London-based AI bioprocess simulation software startup New Wave Biotech has raised €1.2 million in its latest funding round through a mix of equity and grant funding to expand its existing team and explore new markets and customers.
Investors include EIT Food (supported by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology) and Innovate UK (part of UK Research and Innovation).
Zoe Yu Tung Law, CEO and Co-Founder at New Wave Biotech commented: “Access to healthy and sustainable food should be a universal right but current food production processes are harmful to the environment and threatened by climate change. From alternative proteins to biochemicals and biomaterials, bioproduction has the potential to transform our food system and supply chains for a more sustainable future. We are on a mission to accelerate these crucial technologies from lab to market. This money will be integral for us to achieve this by investing in our people, building our technology and growing our customer base.”
Founded in 2022 by Zoe Yu Tung Law (CEO) and Oli Hall (CTO), New Wave Biotech focuses on the sustainable transformation of global supply chains. Its mission is to use its simulation software to help biomanufacturing design smarter, commercialise quicker, and scale greener by providing bioprocessing foresight for innovation.
New Wave Biotech’s Bioprocess Foresight platform simulates bioprocesses to predict quantified output, costs and sustainability impact – improving as it learns from empirical-data.
According to their website, “Biomanufacturing has the potential to change the world (literally ⅓ of global manufacturing, with up to 90% less emissions for some products), but 90% of these technologies fail to scale to market. In this industry R&D is slow and insights are painfully expensive, with a huge skills shortage. We believe there’s another way. That’s why we started New Wave Biotech to help biotechnologies scale quicker, cheaper and greener with AI-powered process simulation.“
As per McKinsey & Company, as much as 60% of the physical inputs to the global economy could be produced using synthetic biology. However, this remains a distant concept due to 90% of technologies in the synthetic biology industry failing to scale.
This is due in part to the costly and time consuming elements of R&D. Typically, it takes 3-10 years for a product/technology to move from a lab to the market, with each experiment costing anywhere between €10k-100k.
Adam Adamek, Chief Impact Director at EIT Food concluded: “Momentum is building toward transforming current systems for the better, driven by rising consumer demands for ethical and sustainable products and a compounding global climate emergency. We are pleased to be investing in New Wave Biotech as their committed team and leading edge technology make them perfectly positioned to explore the significant growth potential of this sector.”
New Wave Biotech’s funding round follows on from previous grant awards from Innovate UK and investment from venture capital fund Big Idea Ventures.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2024/12/new-wave-biotech-raises-e1-2-million-to-transform-rd-in-synbio-and-alt-protein-production/
