Deniz Kent, co-founder and CEO of Prolific Machines, raised over $90M from top investors. He emphasizes raising capital when it is not critically needed.
Deniz Kent, co-founder and CEO of Prolific Machines, raised over $90M from top investors. He emphasizes raising capital when it is not critically needed to maintain leverage and favorable terms.
So, in Turkey, it's quite normal to do a 6 day work week. Their standard work day is from 11:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. In many of these cases, you're just like working in a kebab shop. One thing that really stuck with me is that they do it with a smile on their face. You realize like how hard life can actually be for people. That knowledge has always served me well. Whenever I'm having like my hardest days, I remind myself that it's still incredibly privileged relative to so many of other people that I could very easily have been living with. [Music] All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the Dealmaker Show. So today we have a really amazing founder, you know, joining us. Um, you know, I think that we're going to be learning quite a bit from him. You know, really incredible story that he's going to be sharing, the building, the scaling, the financing, you know, you name it. We're going to
be talking about, you know, his vision, what he's thinking for the next 5 to 10 years, how he went, you know, on pivoting on the business from, let's say, growing meat to under light, you know, to also growing drugs now with light. But again, quite the journey. He's also raised 90 million from some of the top investors. We've actually had a bunch of them on the on the show, but we're going to be learning, you know, that capital raising journey, too. So, without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Dennis Kent. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So, child of Turkish immigrants, you know, and and you found yourself growing up in London. So, give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you, Dennis? I kind of grew up between Turkey and the UK. I think it my dad was in Turkey, my mom was in the UK. and I kind of created this uh strange worldview where I
didn't really belong anywhere. Um, and the idea of nationality and nationalism and patriotism always seemed very strange to me. I think partially because I had this strange nomadic childhood where I was constantly going back and forth. Um, I think that I feel culturally more Turkish than than British, even though I spent more time in the UK. Um, especially this like Turkish immigrant mindset which was very much embedded in me as a child from my parents of like, you know, you need to work hard. It's like earn your keep. Um, yeah, I think I think that that has had impacts on my life that have been significant. I think children of immigrants and immigrants generally end up having to uh work quite hard to find that place. No kidding. No kidding. I guess I guess how do you think your um your worldview and your perspective, you know, grew and and perhaps shifted or or was different from maybe
other kids, you know, from having that exposure to two different countries so early. I mean, there's so many people they don't even get on a plane, you know, until they are like in their 40s, 50s, or maybe never. So I think that that maybe opened up, you know, a different lens for you. Definitely. I I think I think it made me uh more grateful. I I remember vividly like that. So So in Turkey, it's quite normal to do a 6 day work week. It's not an unusual thing to do. And there are many people that I interacted with a lot who just worked in a restaurant or a cafe in Turkey. And the standard work day is from 11:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. That's like the the length of time that the establishment would be open, but the people who work there have to come, you know, 30 minutes before to set up and they have to stay 30 minutes later. So they're doing and they do this six days a week. So they're doing
just crazy amounts of work. And in many of these cases, you're just like working in a kebab shop, you know, you're like serving people. And one thing that really stuck with me is that they do it with a smile on their face and are generally quite happy to be there and to be serving you and to be helping you. And at the same time, you see a lot of people in America and Europe who are doing, you know, maybe an 8-hour job that is actually uh much more comfortable than what a lot of these people have to do in Turkey and are really complaining. uh you know there's a there's just a very different perspective when you grow up somewhere that is uh where there's less less opportunity and more competition and you realize like how hard life can actually be for people. So, I think that is that that knowledge has always served me well. Whenever I'm having like whenever I'm having even my hardest days,
I remind myself that it's still inc incredibly privileged relative to so many of other people that I could very easily have been living with um had it not been for a lottery of birth on my part. Obviously, you know, like for for you, you know, like you got into into this whole world, you know, of uh of science, right? and and you know obviously it has taken different shapes different different turns you know like what you've done but in the end you know I mean you you ended up studying at King's College you know and you did there all types of stuff leading all the way up to a PhD so how do you get into you know this whole cellular and molecular medicine biomed and trans translational science I mean how do you get into all of this you know science world I was always good at science as a kid but I I was never really that interested in it until I got into the lab and started doing actual
lab work. I I I really dislike the idea that, you know, you just have to go on to uh a textbook and read something that someone has written and take it as as fact. Like that was something that never felt very appealing to me. I but I vividly remember this moment. It was my first job in the lab and I realized that um science isn't something that you read in textbooks. Science is something that we co-create and that was very exciting for me and that was sort of the start that was well before my PhD but that was the start of my excitement around science. Now in your case you know you started also um you know really in the in an immunology lab. So how does that transition all the way you know to then you know the pharma sector or even you know doing your PhD I mean walk us through those sequence of events that needed to happen. Yeah so my first gig was uh engineering tea cells which are a
type of immune cell to infiltrate into tumors and uh destroy them. Turns out that tumors are very good at suppressing the T- cell response. So I was trying to figure out what is the mechanism there and then is there any drugable targets there. Um that led me to working in the pharmaceutical industry because I was basically studying how to program the immune system or reprogram the immune system and the pharmaceutical industry was very interested in that especially GSK which is a company that I started working for. They were very interested in uh asthma. They had in invented salutimal which is like the inhaler the blockbust blockbuster drug and they were interested in in curing asthma. So I then started a project with them working on a single dose cure for asthma which was a b specific antibbody based and that got me really excited about doing science. that was like my first real
independent research project and um off the back of that I thought that I wanted to run my own academic lab uh and go all in on the science path and that's that's what led me to do a masters and then a PhD. Um but then during my PhD I realized that there was this big problem around tools to control biology and those tools not being very good. initially just a problem for my own research which is that I wanted better tools but then realizing that if I could solve this problem for myself then I could probably solve it for other people too. Um so then that led to a sequence of events uh that that led to me having the realization that that light was the best way to control biology and eventually all biommanufacturing would become optogenetic and that has led to the last six years of of building and scaling prolific machines which is the world's first optogenetic biommanufacturing company.
Now it's it's kind of um a sequence of events there because I mean being you know more like in the academia doing your PhD you know to becoming an entrepreneur that's that's quite a long stretch. So how do you go from like you were saying I mean you saw a need you know you saw a problem you saw frustration that you had there you know from doing like a like a paper a study to like building a business I mean that's that's pretty significant. How do you get that push to be like, I'm gonna build a business around this? I mean, it's just like so outside of what you would typically see on anyone doing a PhD or anyone more like in the science, you know, uh path. Yeah, it was definitely not my first thought. My first thought was uh I could just work at a company and get the company to develop this. And I actually remembered speaking to one of my friends who was an entrepreneur and I was telling
him about this…