Just imagine, you find yourself in a park or on a street, and by merely touching a plant, you can light up the entire area. It’s a scene straight from the pages of a sci-fi novel, yet right here, right now, Bioo, a visionary company founded in Barcelona in 2015, is forging ahead to make this breathtaking vision a reality!
In my 40 years as a business journalist across three continents, Bioo is, without any doubt, the most innovative and exciting company I have ever encountered. Bold statement, you say? Allow me to elaborate. Better still, allow Pablo Vidarte, a born inventor, entrepreneur, and CEO of Bioo to take up the story.
“The beginning was very stereotypical as a story because it began as a dream in the middle of the night. Once awake, I had a very clear goal: to create a world where we could generate energy from nature. To actually create the first biotech cities. Similar to how the industrial revolution brought about significant changes to cities, we believe that biotech and the first biotech cities can do the same.
In my 40 years as a business journalist across three continents, Bioo is, without any doubt, the most innovative and exciting company I have ever encountered
“So, I created a team of volunteers at first, who were engineers, biotechnologists, and many other kinds of scientists. We first started creating biological reactors, which are able to generate energy from soil, and produced a prototype.”
As ambitions go, this is right up there with major milestones such as the Human Genome Project: the ambitious goal to map the entire human genome, achieved in the early 21st century, which revolutionized medicine and biology. Yes, it’s that significant, and equally crucial for a world that requires a rapid and efficient ‘re-set’.
Given the magnitude of the task, Pablo’s expertise makes him the ideal person to lead this initiative. His remarkable journey began at just eight years old when he started programming video games, and by 16, he was already making waves by challenging NASA and the Spanish army to revolutionize external combustion engines. “I wanted to perfect a system that NASA produced in 2002 oriented to power cars,” he says, and that’s exactly what he did. Pablo modestly describes this achievement as “pretty cool,” even though he managed to improve efficiency by an astonishing 60%.
“We are harnessing the power of living organisms to produce energy”
Powering Tomorrow with Nature
“We’re working with a lot of very different technologies,” Pablo continues, the first of which was the bioreactor, which works like a battery that has micro-organisms inside—like in The Matrix!
“We’re harnessing the power from the interaction of living organisms and organic matter to produce energy. Throughout their life, they just eat organic matter in the soil, and in that process, they set electrons free; they generate energy the same way our stomach does. In our stomachs, you liberate that energy in the shape of heat, but what we do, before it transforms into heat, is we collect those free electrons with two carbon sponges that create electricity.
“On top of that, the same way that your stomach collects gases, here we’re generating hydrogen. However, hydrogen is really unstable, and it needs to combine with something. So what we did is combine the hydrogen with the oxygen in the air and they bind together, creating water. We’re literally generating water out of soil and thin air.”
The water, which is essentially water vapor, is used for sub-surface irrigation of a field, and it also reduces heat from above as it passes through the soil—it’s like a natural air-conditioning system that produces cooler vapor. This product is called the Bioo Panel—it’s the first product on the market in history that allows parks and gardens to make money instead of you having to spend it. Some water is still required to irrigate the product but this method reduces water consumption by around 50% compared to regular irrigated natural environments. This groundbreaking product will disrupt the market.
Working with Living Things: Bioluminescence
Bioo has several other technologies poised to revolutionize their fields. One of these, aside from providing a material impact, provides an aesthetic one, too. In this instance, Bioo is working with three different methods, as Pablo explains: “The first is natural bioluminescence, working with living things, fungi in this case, which are naturally bioluminescence. We work with 58 different species, and three of them are native to the Arabian peninsula.
“We also work with an organic compound that is actually absorbed by the plant. It’s organic, it’s non-toxic, and it grows with the plant. So once the plant absorbs that compound for 24 hours, the plant can grow. The impressive about that is that we can apply it to local species, so we have a bioluminescence palm tree, for example, and those are things we are already doing in Saudi.”
Living Signals: Harnessing the Power of Natural Antennas
Bioo has developed a technology that seems straight out of the 25th century, too! Envision a scenario where you can walk through a forest and engage in activations and automations directly with the plants. “People will touch a plant and store messages, create art, and interact with nature itself,” Pablo explains. “We even produced a mixing board made of plants for a piano!
“The interesting part of this is that we do it using a technology that uses plants as natural antennas – plants can naturally perceive changes in frequencies and you can read those frequencies. A plant can tell you if it needs water, if it has a disease, or if it needs sunlight. What we do is specifically detect the human frequency, and it’s pretty cool because if you touch it with something that’s not human, let’s say you touch it with a pen or a bird touches it, it won’t get activated.”
“People will touch a plant and store messages, create art, and interact with nature itself”
Saudi Arabia 2030: Transforming Dreams into Reality
Bioo has created a variety of technologies that involve using plants as biological switches or generating electricity from nature. Together, these applications increase the property value of buildings by up to 20%, increase visitor traffic by around 30%, and even improve the well-being, productivity (by around 15%), and efficiency of those who work in them.
The focus of Bioo’s technological advancements is to seamlessly integrate into biotech cities, urban areas that prioritize sustainability and utilize state-of-the-art technologies to establish a mutually beneficial connection with the natural environment.
Currently, Bioo has already implemented installations in Spain (in areas of Barcelona, Ibiza, Seville, and Madrid), France (Paris), and the UK (the Eden Project in Cornwall), among others. It is also involved in various other projects, such as the transformation of the Port of Barcelona into a huge green space, and others in San Jose (Silicon Valley), Boston, and Dubai.
“The Saudi market is really open to the biotech revolution”
As a result, the European Parliament named it as Europe’s most innovative company and included its founder, Pablo Vidarte, in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list. Bioo is mainly funded by the European Union and international technology funds, and is working steadily towards what they are sure is the next technological revolution: the biotechnological evolution.
Unsurprisingly, Saudi Arabia is one of its most exciting markets. “The Saudi market is really open to the biotech revolution. They’re not just looking to create a transformation, they also have imagination and forethought. You can look at a lot of countries worldwide that are trying to do things well or better, but no one has a vision of doing a radical change, as is the case with Vision 2030.
We’re starting projects in Saudi Arabia and, due to its great vision and investment in the world’s most transformative projects, we founded “Bioo Arabia” as our headquarters in Riyadh with our Saudi partners and registered with the Ministry of Investment (MISA), agricultural solutions, landscape design with local assembly and manufacturing in addition to installation and maintenance services covering the entire spectrum in the region with key local partners from developers, consultants and contractors whom each is a leader in the field,” Pablo concludes.
Saudi Arabia, sharing Bioo’s visionary spirit, has become the ideal partner in driving the much-needed innovation our world seeks. United, their cooperation offers the prospect of a paradigm shift in our lifestyles and a secure, environmentally-conscious future for generations to come.
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