- 7 minutes ago
Using his background in biology, Eric Herrera brews up proteins in his lab that can dissolve rocks. His goal? Make harvesting valuable metals easier on miners—and the environment. The idea came to him in 2022, while on an Explorers Club expedition in the Arctic Circle. There, Herrera, who served for two years in the Navy as a medical scientist, encountered iron-eating bacteria that survived by secreting chemicals that could melt minerals, leaving behind the iron for the bacteria to absorb. Soon, he launched Maverick, based in San Francisco, which uses the same organic proteins to extract oil and minerals at scale without harmful chemicals or high-pressure systems. “Simply put, we break rocks and take out all the goodies,” Herrera says. With Maverick, companies don’t even need to dig a traditional mine. Instead, they simply drill a small hole, pump the proteins and bring the liquefied elements up as if they were water. “What we’re left with is a soup of critical elements, and we separate them,” he says. In 2025, Maverick raised a $19 million seed round led by Olive Tree Capital with participation from Y Combinator.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00A little brash, but in one case, I actually did dunk my hand in there.
00:03Showing them how it's actually working is really how you make a move into these fields.
00:17Eric, thanks so much for joining us today.
00:19Thanks for having me. Pretty excited to be here.
00:20Now tell me what you guys are building at Maverick.
00:23So at Maverick, we are designing, developing, and producing the chemicals needed to extract
00:28all the critical resources, whether it be oil, gas, or critical elements like lithium, gold, uranium.
00:34Tell me about the old way the industry did these things and then what Maverick brings to the table
00:39here. Yeah. So the traditional legacy methods are pretty disastrous. They're bad for the environment
00:46and worse, they're inefficient. So for certain elements, let's say gold, for example, you have
00:52to mix mercury. Mercury is neurotoxic. You get the gold ore, you mix the mercury. In certain
00:58locations, they actually still mix it by hand. And eventually you get a gold alum. What we do is
01:03we pump in our chemicals. We don't even have to dig a mine. We essentially do in situ recovery,
01:08where we dig a small hole, pump our chemicals down, and bring up the gold as if it were water.
01:14And so it's much cleaner, much faster, much safer, and ultimately much, much cheaper to produce these
01:20chemicals. And we do the same thing with oil and gas. Instead of pumping down sulfuric acid,
01:25hydrochloric acid, pretty, pretty toxic chemicals. We just pump in our biologically produced chemicals
01:31that fractures the ore body and takes everything of value out.
01:35Wow. So like, let's back to gold for a second. I picture this is like a big lump of like
01:38of rock and other things and the golds in between.
01:42Yes.
01:42Does your chemicals kind of eat away the rock and just the gold remains?
01:46We eat away and nothing remains. So essentially we break everything apart.
01:50Everything apart and it goes into a solution. And so it's much faster to move around water
01:55and move around liquids than it is to bring something hundreds or thousands of feet up
01:59from the surface. And so we essentially mine gold as if it were water coming out of a well.
02:06So it all kind of melts together?
02:07Yes.
02:08And then what happens next?
02:09Then we run through a process. We essentially take out all of the crud, all of the sulfur,
02:15the sulfides, the silicates, and what we're left with is a soup of critical elements, whether
02:21it be gold, iridium, which are typically found together. And we separate them based on some
02:27are valuable, some are not. Gold, of course, is valuable. And we run it through resins. And
02:31those resins allow us to take certain metals of value out.
02:35Wow. What are these chemicals you guys use? Because it sounds like you said, I mean, this
02:39sounds like very powerful stuff. The idea like you're melting a rock.
02:42Yeah.
02:42That scares me a little bit. Like, what are these? What are they made out of?
02:46Biology. So in short, they are proteins. And the way I found them was pretty interesting.
02:53So I'm a member of the Explorers Club. Every year I try to go on an expedition. And 2022,
02:59I was in the Arctic. So I was in Greenland, in northern Greenland, around the Kangalusawak.
03:04And just how you and I do respiration, we need oxygen. Oxygen has to bind to iron. And so
03:11bacteria are the same way. They need iron, but there's no iron up there. So they naturally
03:14produce these chemicals. They spit them out, and they melt the rock to take the iron out.
03:18No way.
03:19What I did was I found the bacteria up there, took it back to the lab, and said, how can
03:24I overproduce this chemical? How can I make this chemical even stronger? And so I didn't
03:28invent it. I essentially found it in nature and adjusted it to fit the industry.
03:34It sounds like these are bacteria creating a tiny amount of the substance.
03:39Yes.
03:39And you're obviously dumping it into mines. I assume there's a long, large volume of this.
03:44Yes.
03:44How do you mass produce it?
03:46We re-engineered existing infrastructure. So bioproduction is really the thing that's holding
03:55back synthetic biology and biology at scale. We can produce very simply a couple of liters
04:01here, a couple of liters there. But when you're talking about kiloliters or megaliters, in some
04:06cases, we're producing for certain mines millions of liters. We actually have to find totally
04:14new ways to do it. So one of the cool things about biotech is that it scales interestingly.
04:19It doesn't scale one-to-one just how it doesn't matter whether a cell in a mouse or a cell in
04:26a great white, very different sizes, but the cell is the same. So we have to change the
04:31entire organism. And one of the easiest ways that we found was actually re-engineering sewage pits.
04:38So right now, most of the sewage pits in America, where sewage goes to be treated into potable water
04:45again, relies on bacteria. So we took one of those, we re-engineered it as a fermentation vessel,
04:50and that's what actually allows us to produce as much as we want.
04:53Wow. What is this chemical called?
04:55Lithex. Lithex.
04:57So lithex, if it's for mine, lithex is from the Greek lithios, rock, and petrox for the oil industry.
05:04Gotcha. If I stick my hand in this stuff, not a good idea?
05:09Safer than acid. Much safer than acid.
05:12So this stuff can eat rock, but you can transport it and it doesn't hurt?
05:15Yeah. It doesn't really hurt anything unless it's in the specific oxidation state. So it's much safer,
05:21and that's really one of the main selling points. If you are producing and shipping large quantities
05:27of acid, of corrosive equipment, that is going to eat into your margins. So if we can make a non-hazmat
05:34version of these, then we've just eliminated up to half the cost, because half the cost is
05:39transporting hazardous material.
05:40Wow. Crazy. Tell me about like, I heard about this, you know, you went on an explorer's club
05:45and you found something, you found a whole new business model.
05:48Yeah.
05:48But your background is biology. Tell me about like how you went from,
05:51tell me about your background in education and how you got into this world.
05:56Yeah. So my background is actually medicine.
05:57Okay.
05:58Medicine, synthetic biology, toxicology. Before starting Maverick, I was actually working for the military
06:04and we were developing antidotes for chemical weapons. So sarin, nerve gas, for example, BX,
06:09all of these chemical weapons have a very similar crystal structure to rocks, actually.
06:16One is phosphorus, one is silica. And I figured I'm really good at breaking this stuff down.
06:22So we actually made viruses that go into the human body, break down these chemical weapons in situ
06:27or inside the human body, and they worked perfectly. So I thought, can we adapt this to
06:33break something else? Can we adapt it to break down carbon plastics, for example, or silicates?
06:39And yes. And so that's where I got the idea and I needed to find that base. And that's what took me
06:45to the Arctic and actually took me all over the world. So I try to do one expedition a year. Last year,
06:51we recreated part of Darwin's 200th anniversary of the Beagle. So I sailed a couple hundred miles
06:57along the Pacific, taking DNA samples from everywhere. Later this year, I'm going to the
07:02South Pole. So we're actually sailing from Chile all the way to Antarctica, collecting more DNA samples
07:07and seeing, can we expand the portfolio even more? Where were you working when you kind of saw this
07:12bacteria eating the rocks? Were you at a current job or did you switch? I always wanted to study
07:18medicine. I actually dropped out of medical school. So it was a hard decision, dropping out of medical
07:22school with a full scholarship to be a Navy surgeon. Wow. Okay. And so interesting conversation,
07:30told my parents I'm dropping out and I'm going to California and doing a startup, moving to San
07:36Francisco, going to Y Combinator. And then during Y Combinator, that's where I actually developed the
07:42science, where we actually went to the Arctic, took the samples and advanced it to this point.
07:47Take me into your mindset because you were, you know, studying a very, you know, highly qualified,
07:52you know, highly specialized path. What made you decide to go in a whole different direction?
07:58Well, what drives me really is seeing an invention make the jump from the lab to actually helping
08:05someone. And that's very clear in medicine. The problem is it takes years from I found this new
08:11drug to this drug is helping people. It's about 14 years on average in the U.S.
08:17With industrial biotech, it's weeks, it's days in some cases that we can actually develop something
08:23and have it put into practice. And that's what really drove me to say, well, if I can make the
08:29biggest impact in industrial biotech, I should.
08:31You know, studying to become a Navy surgeon and then running a company, two very tough jobs,
08:39but different skill sets. What do you know about starting a business? Did you, have you always had,
08:44um, been studying entrepreneurship or did you just say like, I'm going to go for it? Like, how'd you
08:47learn to, you know, you're in a pure, you're, you're in study academic mode and now you're in founder
08:52company running mode. Tell me about that switch.
08:55Yeah, it's very different, but ultimately the, the basis is the same. You need discipline.
09:02You need very highly ordered mechanics. You need your people to understand what is the goal?
09:07What is the overall reason why you're here? Why are you, why are we all working on the same project?
09:14And I think that's, that's very similar in entrepreneurship and in the military.
09:19And I think the leadership aspect of it as well. What was it like being a white combinator?
09:23Because I know, I mean, I know this all walks of life, but I'm sure there's the time of software
09:29and AI, like right now there's like a lot of tech and you're doing tech, but you're doing biotech.
09:34You're creating, you know, enzymes that eat rocks. What was, what did people think there? And like,
09:38how, what, tell me about that experience with the other startups? That was awesome.
09:42Um, funny story. I actually asked Sam Altman what an API was. I'm still have no idea what an API is.
09:48I'm not, uh, computational, but everyone looked at me like, what? Um, then someone in the background,
09:53like, no, no, he's biotech. It's okay. Um, so that should, but pretty much sums it up.
09:58We were surrounded by amazingly smart people doing crazy innovation. Uh, and we took advantage of it.
10:05We started asking questions. Um, how can we use this computer model to increase the production of
10:10our bacteria? How can we use this large language model to make reports as fast as possible and as
10:17efficient as possible? So that really helped us play off other people. And, uh, the same happened
10:23with us. Uh, we have calls all the time, like, Hey, what if we change this, uh, with our protein?
10:29What if we change that with our production method? Who's doing your design and engineering at scale?
10:35And so it's, it's a pretty collaborative environment, but just picking and choosing and then, uh, being open
10:40to help other people. How do you guys make money and what is your business model?
10:45Yeah. Excellent question. So how do we make money? We essentially sell protein. We sell our chemicals
10:52to both the mining and metallurgy space and to the energy space. So for example, a, an oil well in Texas,
10:59we're currently based in Texas, uh, is considered fully exploited when it only about 30% of the oil has
11:05been extracted. So what we do is we sell our chemical, we pump it down into old oil wells and
11:11break the rock, break everything apart. That takes up the oil, it takes up water and it takes up all
11:15the metals that are inside there. And then we take a cut. We take a cut of the metals. We take a cut of
11:19the oil plus selling our, our chemical, uh, for the mines. We actually just sell the chemical and the
11:25mines are operating at such a large scale. For example, a heap leaching operation that we're working
11:30with is 200 meters by 300 meters by two kilometers long. All of that has to be irrigated with our
11:37chemical. So, uh, we're essentially a chemicals company. Oh. And in terms of we, you mentioned
11:42with the oil companies, do you, do your team have to then, do you teach them how to use it and then you
11:47have to extract it? Is that all your side or you just kind of give them the product and they know what
11:50to do with it? No, it's, it's definitely a collaborative environment. So oil companies are very
11:55good at taking up oil. They're not so good at taking up metals and taking up, uh, water and
12:01treating the water. So there essentially are three different business models in there. There are three
12:06different, uh, revenue sources and we work pretty close with them. Sometimes we produce lithium, uh,
12:13lithium carbonate, lithium chloride. Other times we produce gold, uh, platinum metals, and then other
12:18times uranium and thorium. And so all of these have such unique, um, business cases and, uh, engineering
12:26roles that we have to play. Uh, it's, it's a pretty exciting role. And it's a while that before all that
12:30stuff would just be left in the ground, but now all this extra value is coming up, especially, you know,
12:35you mentioned like lithium and things where like there's such an appetite for batteries and everything.
12:38That's, that's wild. How many employees do you have? Currently we have around 25. Okay. Yes.
12:43And it's pretty much spread around biology, chemistry, uh, engineering, design, and a lot of it,
12:52uh, as we're starting now to grow the business. So getting more salespeople, getting more people
12:56that can actually go out and interact with these customers. So cool. How much money have you raised?
13:01We've raised 19 million so far, and we're going to start off our new fundraising mode. Uh,
13:07next fundraising is set to begin next quarter. What's, what's your advice for raising money for somebody?
13:12Be direct, tell people exactly what you do, tell people how you raise money, and ultimately
13:20have a clear path forward and make that path forward very, very clear to everyone, to customers,
13:25to investors, to your own team. What's been the biggest surprise going from the medical field world
13:31to the mining, just the startup world? How fast everything moves, which is good and bad. In, in
13:39medicine, like I mentioned, it's 14 years from I developed a medicine to this medicine is in someone
13:43helping them. Customers don't think in terms of years in oil and gas. It's, you have a chemical,
13:50please, uh, send me two truckloads tomorrow. That's insane. That's great for business.
13:55It stresses out scientists. And so that was a very interesting way to change our thinking about it. And
14:02ultimately it's, it's really to our benefit. What, what's like the best mindset for someone who's
14:09going from one field or one career to another? Cause you made a big switch. Like what is like,
14:15what goes through your head? And also what's a great advice for someone who's not going to make
14:18a big life change? I would say it's all generally the same. An atom is an atom, no matter if it's in
14:25a human body or a gold in an oil well or gold in a mine, atom is an atom. So go back to the fundamentals,
14:33figure out, can this, do I have the skillset to actually make that jump? In, in a lot of cases,
14:40yes. Uh, we just have to really think what is the basis of this jump? And then what is the basis of each
14:46field that we're jumping into? And then don't be afraid. You can always go back.
14:50And that's sort of what I told my parents. If this doesn't work out, I'll just go back to medical
14:54school. I, you'll, you'll have a surgeon in the family. And so far I haven't had to go back to
14:58medical school. So it's, it's pretty well. That's terrific. You mentioned, you know,
15:02working with, with Y Combinator, working with all these technologists. How do you view AI? Are you
15:07using AI at all in your business, in developing chemicals, or is that just not part of the game
15:13plan right now? Yeah, no, we definitely use AI and we actually require it from all our scientists.
15:19If it can decrease their workload, it should. And it's doing some things that are pretty,
15:24pretty interesting. So we designed DNA. We designed some of the viruses, uh, that we use to actually
15:29produce the bacteria, uh, to induce the bacteria to produce our chemical, uh, fully with AI. So it's
15:35interesting. It's also scary how easy it is to fully design a virus, produce it, and actually have it
15:43shipped to you almost fully with AI. It's, it's pretty insane. Who ships viruses?
15:49Lots of companies in the US. You just order up a virus and they make it for you?
15:52Yep. It's only takes about, uh, two weeks, two weeks, no background check, no questions asked.
15:58Sort of scary. Coming from, um, coming from a background in biological and chemical warfare,
16:04there's a lot of stuff that you can do. Is there other checks on these things?
16:08Not currently. Okay. Not currently. And because of AI,
16:11we can actually go around any checks that there would. So the easiest check would be,
16:16are you producing something that genetically is similar to something that would harm you?
16:21So you can't print smallpox DNA. You can't print the plague, but with AI, you can actually change
16:28the letters of the DNA code and have them emulate that. And so it doesn't get picked up as being smallpox,
16:35but the actual virus would work the same way as smallpox.
16:39When you create like a new bacteria and create a new virus and then create this,
16:43these compounds, does it have to be cleared by the government?
16:47No. So the US is very permissive and that's, that's both a good and bad thing.
16:53Our collaborators in Europe and our friends in synthetic biology,
16:57they have such a hard time even ordering GFP. GFP is green fluorescent protein that comes from
17:02jellyfish actually. And it's really good at telling researchers where you're producing protein,
17:07which cells are viable, all that. They just can't even get that stuff because the EU has so many
17:12regulations. When I was taking samples from, from New Zealand, from Australia, the amount of paperwork I
17:19needed to get to transport one test tube of dirt was insane. And then here in the US, it's completely
17:25different, but you can also, you can also see it in the, in the biotech. Biotech in the US is just
17:30booming. Biotech everywhere else is sort of dragging itself. Wow. Yeah.
17:35You know, you obviously, I want to talk about sustainability is a big deal and you are a sustainability
17:40play. Tell me about kind of the mission and how sustainability plays a role in your business.
17:45Yes. So currently we are still producing a lot of oil. We're using a lot of oil. That's where our energy
17:55comes from. We're moving forward and producing wind, solar, nuclear, but all these require
18:02critical resources. So we know that we're moving into higher lithium capacity. We're moving into nuclear
18:09reactors with thorium, with uranium. We can produce them, the legacy methods, acids, roasting, fracking,
18:17but there has to be a better way. So we're sort of preempting that and essentially saying,
18:21we'll treat the legacy energy, which is oil and natural gas, make it much more efficient,
18:25make it much more green, as green as you can make oil and gas. But also all the metals that are going
18:32to power the green revolution should be also produced as efficiently and as non-invasively as possible.
18:40So for example, a copper mine, sometimes when you think of a mine, you think of a hole in the ground.
18:47Yeah. You think of a massive sprawling complex of tunnels. It doesn't have to be that way.
18:54That's very harmful for the environment. So what you can do is, or what I was thinking,
18:59what if you can produce metals as efficiently as we produce oil, where once the metal is gone,
19:04once the mine is essentially up, all that's left is a little hole in the ground. Because we've melted
19:11all the rock, we've taken out all the metals, and then we've actually refilled that cavity with
19:18CO2-based cement. And so can we even take it one step further and produce carbon negative metals?
19:24And so far, yes, that's where we are.
19:26Wow, that's wild. Is there a business philosophy that is important to your life? And tell me what
19:33effect it's had in the business so far?
19:35Efficiency. A lot of B2B SaaS is very, I guess, very inefficient. You have time to make adjustments.
19:45You have time to release a beta and then see how customers like it, change it. You don't have that
19:54luxury in oil and gas. You don't have that luxury in mines. These are very different than the move
20:00fast and break things, as we're taught in NYC, as we're taught in Silicon Valley. This is, it has to
20:05work. It has to work the first time. If not, people can die. People can suffocate. These mines are
20:13operating with acids. They're operating with hundreds of workers. These oil wells are at 8,000 PSI.
20:19There's no room for mistakes. And so getting it right, getting it right the first time and making
20:25sure that it stays right is pretty much our philosophy.
20:28So you're a young guy and you're operating in traditional industries, capital intensive,
20:34some methods in mining and oil probably haven't changed in 100 years. How do you get credibility in
20:39this business when they see this young kid with this crazy idea and new product? How do you break through?
20:44Yeah. So I'm 27, definitely young, definitely much younger than the average miner and the average
20:50oil engineer. Something I noticed that was interesting was when I was in the Navy,
20:55no one questioned it. It's, oh yeah, the Lieutenant had this report. Cool. Perfect. Here,
21:02people just care about the science. No one cares what your experience, no one cares about where you worked,
21:08what you did, what you look like. It's, does your product work? Show me the results. Show me that
21:14you're going to take out more lithium, that you're going to take out more oil, that this is safe.
21:19And so being results forward is really how we get our customers and how we gain that credibility.
21:24And it's where I'm most comfortable as a scientist, showing the results first.
21:29I'm going to say, how do you prove that your method is more efficient and safer?
21:34A little brash, but in one case, I actually did dunk my hand in there. I got a bucket,
21:41dunked my hand and said, because I'm not made of silicon, nothing has happened to me. Nothing is
21:46happening to me. Then I dumped a little core sample from a mine site and you can actually see it start
21:52to dissolve as if it were acid. And showing them that I'm really willing to put the money where my
22:00mouth is and take a risk really got them a little bit more comfortable. And then showing them the
22:05results, showing them how it's actually working, getting them excited and showing them real data
22:11is really how you make a move into these fields. I love that example with your hand because it's
22:17the old business cliche of you have to eat your own dog food. And by staging that bold stunt,
22:22you had a big bowl of dog food for sure. Yeah. And my hand survived. Perfect. Awesome. Thank you.
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