Confidence in larvae-based protein blooms as French biotech company, InnovaFeed is boosted by new funding round.
The French company InnovaFeed has recived a EUR 40 million boost for the investement of the launch of 5 new production sites by 2020, according to a press release.
InnovaFeed secured over EUR 55M in 2018 to establish insect production as a key segment of tomorrow’s agro-industrial landscape.
The new investors have chosen to back InnovaFeed in its scale up effort and are joining investors that include Olivier Duha (Co-founder of Webhelp) and the Partners of Accuracy, and banking players structured around Crédit-Agricole with, among others, Caisse d’Epargne, BNP and HSBC. They are taking over from the company’s early investors, Alter Equity or Finovam.
Following the implementation of the new European regulations, in late 2017, allowing the use of insect protein in aquaculture, InnovaFeed launched a pilot site which kicked-off its industrial production. Thanks to this first production site, InnovaFeed in partnership with a French retailer.
Building on its successes of the first half of the year, the company announced in September the construction of a new production site in partnership with Téréos, a French a cooperative sugar group, which will increase its production capacity to 10 000 T of protein/yr.
The company will use Tereos’s by-product stream from starch production to feed insects.
The company said that the participation of larger investors will enable InnovaFeed short to strengthening the core team, expected to triple in size by end of 2019.
They will deploy its production model at a larger scale, including international expansion by the end of 2022.
«We believe that the success of our project will rely first and foremost on building a world class team, with strong values. It will also require deploying our model on new geographies, starting with Europe and the Unites States. The support of these new investors, by the reach they bring to our company, will enable us to achieve the vision we had when we founded InnovaFeed” explained Clément Ray, co-founder and president of InnovaFeed.
According to Florent Thomann, Member of Executive Committee of Creadev, « We are very happy to associate with Aude, Clément, Bastien and Guillaume, whom form a very skilled founding team. We have been particularly convinced by their strategic choices and the quality of the processes they have introduced early on in the company, essential when envisioning large-scale growth».
