Given the current challenges with — in some countries bans of Glyphosate, Glufosinate becomes a possible candidate to replace the widespread usage of Glyphosate in agriculture. Glufosinate, however, is long plagued by three major issues — the high cost (roughly 2x-3x over Glyphosate), high environmental impact, and relatively small selection of Glufosinate-resistant seeds.

To improve the market competitiveness of Glufosinate, Vulpes developed an entirely new manufacturing process for L-glufosinate, to reduce Glufosinate’s environmental impact, reduce its cost, and potentially better place Glufosinate as a possible candidate to replace Glyphosate.

Unlike major competitors on the market, Vulpes’s novel process thinks out of the box. For the chirality of L-glufosinate, existing manufacturing processes often rely on either asymmetric synthesis or enzyme-based methods. Asymmetric synthesis greatly limits the industrial capacity and some methods use cyanide catalysts and enzyme-based synthesis has a lot of waste. In short, all existing processes are expensive, and most more expensive than Glufosinate.

Vulpes’s novel process avoid all the aforementioned problems and is massively cheaper than existing processes.

With the novel process, Vulpes has achieved the following:

• No enzyme or fermentation involved
• High Enantiomeric Excess
• Environment-friendly and simple process
• Key intermediate II << $8,000/ton, before scaling up