Genomines

Hearing my name called in Bangkok and seeing Genomines on that screen stopped me in my tracks. A Lebanese immigrant who started a company in France with no network, no roadmap, and no guarantee it would work. From that starting point to Cartier’s stage, and now to the world. This week, at the Cartier Women's Initiative, I received the Science & Technology Pioneer Award, and I won’t pretend it didn’t move me. Not just because of the global recognition itself, but because of everything compressed inside that moment: the failed experiments, the fundraising conversations that went nowhere, the nights of real doubt,the founder loneliness and the choice, made again and again, to keep going anyway. Building a company means living in the future tense for years. You rarely get permission to look back and see how far you’ve come. Bangkok gave me that. What struck me most was being surrounded by women founders from every corner of the world, each carrying their own version of the same quiet stubbornness. Different missions. The same courage.🔥 🌱GenoMines sits at the intersection of biotechnology, climate action, and critical mineral supply chains. It’s a hard problem, a long game, and exactly where I want to be. The most urgent problems don’t belong to any one country. Neither do the women solving them. I left Bangkok grateful, grounded, and ready for what comes next.💫 And Finally to the real rockstars Team Genomines I am bringing that trophy home 🏆🏆 #CartierWomensInitiative #Entrepreneurship #ClimateTech #Biotechnology #Womeninbusiness #Deeptechstartups

This video reached people I never expected to reach. From countries I have never visited. With stories I will not forget. I've been sitting with that for a few days now. When Madame Figaro and Cartier approached me, the conversation wasn't just about business plans, fundraising, or technology. It was about something much more personal: what shapes us, what drives us, what keeps us moving forward when nobody is watching. We rarely talk about that part. As founders, leaders, scientists, and dreamers, we spend years building things that may or may not succeed. But before we build companies, we build ourselves. And that journey is almost never visible. The fear. The self-doubt. The resilience. The moments when you choose to continue, even when the outcome is uncertain. I think it resonated because it was genuine. The hardest part about being a builder is carrying conviction for a vision too large, while you still don't have all the evidence. That is not something you can perform. Either you have lived it or you haven't. And you cannot carry it alone. My team are the people who helped me turn uncertainty into collective momentum. We built an environment where I don't need to have all the answers because answers emerge when the right people are in the room. They never asked whether plants could mine metals. They asked how they could contribute. That is the foundation everything else is built on. To everyone who reached out: thank you. You reminded me that our stories become powerful the moment they stop being about us and start helping others believe in themselves. Thank you to Madame Figaro and Cartier Women's Initiative for creating a space for those stories to be told. Check it out on both TikTok and Instagram (in the comments): 👇 Fabien Koutchekian Stéphane Robic Silvia Costa Naeimeh SOUSARAEI, PhD. Boney Kuriakose Ph.D. Naeif Matar, PhD Raja Durai Zakaria RIFAI Abhay Veer Singh Rim CHAMAS Muhsin Parson Florinda Gama Clement Nicolle Dani Sukkar, Ph.D. Danish AHMAD Retief Gouws Amorie Best Arina Khotimsky Christina Pfalzgraf Kusa Mazibuko Gaetan de Buyer Londiwe Portia Simanga Avril Molefe Chartered Accountant Aidan Dunning Natasha Rooi

Just back from a week with the Genomines team in South Africa. Progress on the ground is real! I want to focus today on the team: agronomists, technicians, financial controllers, managers etc. Different nationalities. Different decades of experience. People who’d never set foot on an extraction site before this year, alongside people who’ve spent twenty years on them. What we’re building doesn’t sit inside one discipline. So we don’t hire from one. We hire people who’ve done one hard thing well and want to do a harder one next. We’re hiring across both locations: 🇫🇷 Les Ulis, France Chief of Staff to the CTO Research Scientist, Biotechnology Lab Manager Plant Production Technician Chief Commercial Officer Business Intern 🇿🇦 Johannesburg, South Africa Head of Agriculture Please find the open positions here: https://lnkd.in/e8fa4siA #Genomines #Phytomining #NowHiring #DeepTech #CriticalMinerals Dali Rashid, PhD. Genomines

Who actually built Europe's battery industry? Not just Europeans. This Thursday I'm joining the French presidential delegation to Japan and South Korea and will be meeting the players who are shaping both European and global battery manufacturing capacity. Manufacturers SK On, Samsung SDI, LG Energy Solution, AESC, and Panasonic are among the companies that have spent decades building deep technical expertise, mastering supply chains, and proving their scale-up capabilities. For Europe and France, the lesson is clear: collaboration builds a battery transition that works. Europe has a long-term vision, policy momentum, and decarbonization demand. Japan and South Korea have the industrial and strategic maturity required for execution. This also raises an important question upstream: how do we build resilient, decarbonized, and geographically diversified supply chains to feed this industrial base? At Genomines, that's exactly what we're working on: a plant-based nickel feedstock designed to integrate into global refining and battery supply chains, cleaner and more cost-competitive than conventional extraction. If you're working in any of these spaces and will be in Tokyo or Seoul that week or know someone I should meet, DM me or drop a comment. #criticalminerals #nickel #EVbatteries #japan #southkorea #Genomines