Felipe Israel Gil Gutierrez
Chief Executive Officer (CEO), co-founder
Leads company strategy, science and R&D direction, product, brand, and external representation. Based in Basel, Switzerland.
SECTION 01 / Company
The company behind
bioengineered melanin
Crudo Labs is a bioengineered-melanin company producing high-purity bio-melanin at industrial scale for coatings, energy, optics, skincare, and neuroscience. Our mission is simple: take nature's most versatile material and finally make it scalable, so a single ancient biomaterial can serve markets that have never had anything in common.
SECTION 02 / The story
Nature already solved it. We made it scalable.
Melanin has done the hard work in nature for hundreds of millions of years, shielding from UV and radiation, scavenging free radicals, conducting charge, and holding pigment. The bottleneck was never the molecule. It was producing melanin pure, consistent, and in industrial volume. Crudo Labs is built around solving exactly that, which turns a fascinating natural pigment into a platform biomaterial that crosses markets most companies would need a different chemistry for.
SECTION 03 / Team
Who we are
Crudo Labs was co-founded in 2024 by Felipe Gil Gutierrez (CEO) and Ieva Sibilla Strupule (COO).
Ieva Sibilla Strupule
Chief Operating Officer (COO), co-founder
Leads operations, fundraising, investor relations, strategic partnerships, and business development. Based in Jurmala, Latvia.
SECTION 04 / The approach
A defensible platform, not a commodity
Crudo Labs' core advantage is a proprietary process for producing high-purity bio-melanin at industrial scale. What is hard to replicate is the combination of consistent purity, scalable volume, and application know-how across multiple industries. For investors and partners, that means the platform is defensible and not a commodity material.
Intellectual property
Crudo Labs' production process is the subject of a process-patent application filed in 2024, with additional filings in preparation.
SECTION 05 / The moonshot
Why we exist
Every product line Crudo Labs builds supports one long-horizon ambition: our Parkinson's research program. Parkinson's is associated with the loss of neuromelanin-rich neurons, the very pigment we engineer. The program is early-stage research, not a treatment or a cure, and it is the reason Crudo Labs exists.
Work with Crudo Labs
Talk to our team about investing in or partnering with the company building on BioMelanin.