Interview: Gizem Uysal, Helios. How Nobel Prize-Winning Science is Cleaning Up Our Toughest Industries

The interview with Gizem Uysal, founder at Helios from Türkiye that are creating nanotechnology solutions for efficient CO₂ capture and recovery.

You can listen to the episode with Gizem Uysal on EmpoWomen Podcast:

Or read the interview.

Elevator Pitch

Hi, I’m Gizem, founder of Helios, a climate-tech startup based in Istanbul. At Helios, we are developing next-generation materials called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to capture and reuse carbon dioxide directly from industrial flue gases—places like cement, steel, and energy plants.

What problem are you solving?

The main problem is something that affects all of us: industrial carbon emissions. Sectors like cement, steel, and energy are incredibly hard to decarbonize because their emissions come from the process itself, not just their energy source. Unless we find a way to capture and reuse that CO2, we can’t make a serious impact on climate change.

This is also very personal for me. After years in academia, I saw brilliant scientific work that often stayed in the lab, published in a paper and then forgotten. What’s the point of discovering something incredible if it never reaches the real world that needs it? That feeling pushed me to take a different path. I come from Turkey, a country with a strong industrial sector that carries a big part of Europe’s heavy industry. I’m proud of that, but it also means we see the environmental impact up close. That’s why Helios matters. It’s about showing that science doesn’t have to stay inside the lab.

How does the technology work?

Our solution is actually quite simple to explain. We develop special materials called metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs. In fact, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was recently awarded for the discovery of these materials, which was incredibly exciting for us as it confirms we are working at the frontier of science.

What makes MOFs unique is their structure. You can imagine them as tiny sponges at a molecular scale. A single gram of a MOF has an internal surface area as large as a football field. We can design these materials to selectively trap CO2 molecules. When gas from a cement plant passes through our MOF-based filter, the CO2 gets captured inside its microscopic pores while clean air flows out. Later, by changing the temperature or pressure, we can release the captured CO2 to be reused or stored safely. This means industries don’t have to stop their operations; they can keep producing, but in a much cleaner way.

What was the origin of the startup idea?

The first seeds were planted back in my undergraduate years studying chemistry. My friends and I would talk about big problems like climate change and how science could help fix them. During my PhD, I spent long days in the lab and realized that while we were doing incredible science, it was always staying inside the lab. I love science, but I didn’t want to see it trapped in papers. One day, surrounded by lab equipment, I thought, “We already have everything we need here to make a real impact. Why aren’t we doing it?” That moment changed something for me and the idea for Helios—to bridge the gap between academia and industrial reality—began to take shape. We officially launched as a startup at the beginning of last year.

What is your business model and who are your customers?

Right now, we are producing at a lab scale and selling our materials mainly to universities and R&D groups within industrial companies. It’s been inspiring to see how versatile these materials are—they’re being used for everything from gas storage and biogas upgrading to drug delivery systems.

But that’s just the beginning. As we move from gram-scale to kilogram-scale production, our focus will shift to heavy industries like cement, aluminum, steel, and energy. These sectors desperately need scalable carbon capture solutions, and that’s where our technology can make the biggest impact. We are proud to be one of the first startups in Turkey working specifically on CO2 capture technologies. We are not just building a company; we are helping to shape an entire ecosystem for climate innovation in our region. In the next three to five years, we see our MOFs operating inside real industrial facilities.

What makes your technology unique?

Unlike traditional methods, our MOFs are stable, reusable, and highly selective. We can modify the material’s structure—the metal center or the organic linker—to make it perform optimally under different conditions. For example, one structure might work best for cement emissions, while another is better suited for a steel plant.

We also have a computational chemistry team that runs molecular simulations before we synthesize anything. This allows us to predict how different MOF structures will behave and choose the most promising candidates to make in the lab, which saves a huge amount of time and money. While we have competitors, this is a very new field. Our closest competitor was established five years ago, so we are truly among the pioneers.

What are your biggest challenges?

Our biggest challenge has definitely been scaling up production. What works perfectly with a few milligrams in a beaker under controlled lab conditions doesn’t give the same result in a big reactor. Every small detail—temperature, pressure, mixing—starts to matter. We’ve spent a lot of time optimizing conditions and redesigning our setup to ensure our material remains just as efficient when produced at a higher volume. It’s a lot of trial and error, but that’s the reality of deep tech.

What has your journey as a female founder in deep tech been like?

Being a female founder in deep tech is interesting. This field is already hard—it’s highly technical and full of uncertainty. When you add being a woman, and a young one, it comes with another layer of challenges. There’s a quiet skepticism: Can she really do it? You have to prove yourself twice, once as a scientist and again as a founder. And unfortunately, mansplaining is everywhere.

That’s why building the right team was the hardest part for me. I didn’t just want smart people; I wanted people who listened, respected each other, and collaborated. Now we have that. The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that change doesn’t happen by waiting for permission. You just start, you keep building, and eventually, people stop asking if you can do it and start asking how you did it.

What has your experience been with the EmpoWomen program?

I saw EmpoWomen on LinkedIn and got really excited because it focuses on the “widening area,” which gave me hope that we’d have a fair chance. I was placed on the reserve list for the first cohort, but we didn’t give up. We used the feedback to fix the weak points in our application and were accepted into the second cohort.

The best part of the program is the combination of technical, business, and emotional support. It’s intense, with sessions on everything from deadlines to investor training, and that pressure helps you structure your business thinking while staying true to your scientific roots. But what I appreciate most is the community. As women founders, we face very similar challenges, from funding struggles to confidence barriers. Programs like EmpoWomen create a network that reminds you that you are not alone. It’s been a safe place.

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