Unilever to launch new laundry liquid with breakthrough AI-designed enzyme

Over 90%^[a] of laundry detergent users in India say they want a product that combines powerful cleaning performance with longer-lasting fragrance.

To deliver this, a formulation would typically need to include one enzyme that works on tough cleaning, another that cares for the fabric and a separate technology that optimises fragrance. Doing this, however, would make the product prohibitively expensive and add much supply chain complexity.

Through our partnership with industry-leading protein design company Arzeda, we’ve created an AI-designed enzyme that does all three.

This has been incorporated in our new Surf Excel liquid detergent and will launch in India, a key market for Unilever’s laundry business.

In pre-trials, it recorded the best consumer test results we’ve seen in the last five years.

“To deliver these three consumer benefits in one new technology is a major scientific breakthrough,” says Neil Parry, Head of Biotechnology at Unilever. “This innovation and others in the pipeline will change how we formulate our laundry liquids in the future.”

The India laundry market has huge headroom for growth

While India is predominantly a hand-wash and powders market, washing machine ownership is rising rapidly. Across both urban and rural households, this nearly doubled from 16% in 2018 to almost 29% in 2025, and is projected to top 37% by 2030.

As washing machine ownership rises, the penetration of laundry liquids grows disproportionately, with consumers trading up to premium products and increasing consumption occasions.

Laundry liquids in India – a category segment that Unilever leads – has been growing double digit over the last four years, ahead of the broader laundry detergent category.

“We get the India laundry market and have a deep understanding of the consumer,” says Neil. “By bringing this technology to Surf Excel in India, we’re bringing a major scientific breakthrough with extraordinary benefits to one of our most important laundry markets. This will be an important growth driver for the company.”

Nature, redesigned

Enzymes are one of the most powerful tools we have for cleaning fabric: they target specific dirt and stains, helping clothes come out cleaner, brighter and better cared for.

However, naturally occurring enzymes don’t automatically deliver the specific consumer benefit we want, at the right level, in real-life washing conditions.

This is why enzyme design is so crucial: taking an enzyme with useful natural capability and making it work for the realities of modern laundry.

The challenge is the scale of the search. The number of possible enzyme variants is so vast – practically limitless – that traditional experimentation alone cannot ever explore them.

The traditional method of discovery of a new enzyme is to make huge libraries of new structures and then screen millions of them in the hope that a winning enzyme appears.

This approach has significant limitations. An enzyme may look promising in a laboratory test, but could fail where it matters: on fabric, in real wash conditions.

Better enzyme design, faster

This partnership changes the model.

In an enzyme design space that is almost infinite, with AI tools we can now create and select a manageable number of promising enzymes to test.

This is performed at unprecedented speed – tens, often hundreds of times faster than conventional enzyme development.

Put simply, the old model could test lots of options: the new model helps us choose the right options to test.

That’s the breakthrough. It’s not just faster development: it’s using advanced AI to design enzymes which are entirely new and truly superior.

We can design with the consumer benefit in mind from the start: cleaner, brighter, better-cared-for clothes, delivered in the realities of a modern wash. And because the platform learns from every design–build–test cycle, each round makes the next one smarter.

As Neil says: “This is a powerful example of the future of R&D at Unilever: deep science, computational design and real-world product performance coming together to create products that are not only developed faster but also engineered to be superior.

“This new Surf Excel product shows how the convergence of AI and biotechnology is a game-changer for an industry like home care.”

Frequently asked questions

• What are enzymes?

  Enzymes are a type of protein found within cells and, while minuscule, they play a huge part in everyday life. Our bodies are full of them. They enable chemical reactions that help with everything from breathing to digestion, breaking down toxins and coagulating our blood. In plants, they power photosynthesis. And when it comes to cleaning products, they’ve been a key ingredient for decades, thanks to their impressive ability to break down various types of stains.

• What can partnerships bring to Unilever’s enzyme innovation?

  Working with specialist partners like Arzeda gives us access to cutting-edge capabilities that complement our own R&D expertise. It enables the technology to design, create and manufacture proteins. Together, we’re using world-leading digital biology techniques to learn from the vast number of enzymes in nature, and finding out how they could be applied or even reimagined to make an impact on other products. Reducing the amount of ingredients used in our formulas to reduce their impact on the environment, and creating products that work superbly well in cold water, are two areas where we’ve made progress.

• What are real-world examples of AI enzyme design breakthroughs?

  Unilever’s new Surf Excel Matic Liquid detergent will be the first commercial-scale application of AI enzyme design in our home care business. Working with Arzeda and their AI-native Intelligent Protein Design Technology™, we created an AI-designed, patented enzyme that simultaneously delivers cleaning, fabric care and fragrance benefits – reducing development time significantly compared to traditional methods.