Erick Ramos Murillo is the CEO of Allkemie, a company devoted to the production of customizable, scalable, and low-cost graphene-based nanomaterials. Allkemie came in first place in the December 2025 MFN Sustainability Challenge, winning a $35,000 innovation grant to accelerate the commercialization of their patented technology.

MFN: Would you mind sharing a bit about your path to entrepreneurship?
Erick: I was born and raised in Mexico, and started working as a paramedic when I was 17 years old. During those years, between 1995-2000. Mexico was experiencing a deep economic crisis, known as the Tequila Crisis, and what I noticed was that a lot of people were losing their lives because of (emergency response) equipment and gear shortages. I became convinced that I could save more lives by looking at the bigger picture, so I decided to study economics and later joined the Central Bank of Mexico, where I helped design monetary policy to improve the resiliency of the economy.

After some time, I made a transition into economic development, and found myself at Harvard for graduate school. While participating in a cross-registered course at MIT, I was given an assignment to develop a sustainable solution to a problem affecting at least a million people. This is when I began to realize that the private sector had the power to make a difference in people’s lives. With access to the Center for Nanoscale Systems at Harvard, Alkemie began to take shape.

Allkemie has developed a patented process to produce different types of graphene at a scale, low cost and customizable manner. Unlike traditional two-step processes where graphene is produced first and then modified to be useful with other materials, we use a single step process and AI reinforcement that can be tuned to many applications.

MFN: Your team won the MFN Sustainability Challenge this past December. What impact has this had for you and the company?
Erick: With MFN’s support, Allkemie has developed a process where we add graphene to diesel fuel to reduce soot emissions by 91 percent. The implications are massive. Not only is soot one of the major targets of the EPA, but, at an operation level, users care a lot about soot because it tends to recirculate into the engine. This will cause an increase in maintenance because you’re adding more points of failure, which in turn increases costs and unreliability. By lowering soot emissions, we were able to make the fuel at least 10-percent more efficient, and also lower nitrogen oxide emissions by 33 percent. Participating in the Sustainability Challenge helped us to really focus deeply on this one application of graphene, and the grant we won in the challenge allowed us to start testing more specifically to confirm these numbers.

MFN: Are there additional applications of graphene that you’re focusing on?
Erick: If there is one message I want to get across, it’s that we are in the early stages of graphene utilization. Graphene is a generic name, it’s like saying “plastic” in reference to polymers. When plastic was first developed, you could say, “I have plastic,” but you’re not going to use the same type of plastic for a plastic bag and a car tire; we have exact classifications of plastic for different needs. Similarly, with graphene, you can think of it as the basic element, but there are really close to 700 materials that are called graphene, and all of them have fundamentally different properties.

Allkemie’s strength is our ability to tailor the graphene to your needs. A lot of people in the supply side will advertise that they have the “best” graphene. This usually means that the graphene is pure carbon, it doesn’t have any “defects.” But this desire for a pure product is a fundamental misunderstanding that these “defects” are actually additional particles that will allow the graphene to bond with something else. It’s how the graphene can be tailored for different applications.

Let’s imagine you want to put graphene in cement in order to make it stronger. Well, if you want the graphene to work, it needs to disperse in the water that acts as a binding agent in cement. Now, let’s say you want to put graphene in fuel so that it may have better combustion. Gasoline is oily in nature. How can you have a graphene that disperses well in water and at the same time disperses well in oil? You can’t. You need a different graphene for each application. Alkemie has the patent for technology needed to tailor our graphene, and we’re committed to improving lives with it.