EIT Food Accelerator Network alum uFraction8 secures over £2.5million to scale sustainable and affordable bio-manufacturing systems
Bio-manufacturing solutions startup uFraction8 has secured over £2.5 million in investment, with support from EIT Food, to help scale its food system solutions.
uFraction8, a Scotland-based company developing filter systems for bio-manufacturers, has successfully finalised its investment round, securing over £2.5 million.
These filter systems are designed to help bio-manufacturers harvest products such as cultured meat with energy-efficient, affordable and scalable systems. The investment round was supported by Thia Ventures and Blue Horizon, with EIT Food taking a minority stake in the funding round.
UFraction8 is focused on developing novel instruments to enable more efficient and affordable manufacturing of bio-based products such as microalgae-based foods, cultured meat and yeast-based products such as beer or medicines. This aims to accelerate innovation in these areas, simplify industrial process that use cell cultures for production, and contribute to a more sustainable food system.
The £2.5million of funding will enable uFraction8 to expand its existing facilities in Scotland and Poland, to grow their team, to scale up the technology and to deploy large scale tests with prospective customers.
“Expanding our facilities has enabled us to scale up our technology. This scale-up is crucial in helping us to demonstrate and commercialise at the industrial level of operation. By operating at that scale, we'll be able to have a substantial impact on food systems and how cultured food is produced. Since closing the investment round, we had a strong start to 2022.
We have substantially grown our team (from 5 to 15) and made huge progress on our scale-up project. Thanks to the funding and the support from our investors we're not only on track with planned developments but we're also preparing for customer demonstrations, and we're in discussions for deploying uFraction8 technology within and beyond the European market.”
In 2019 uFraction8 was part of the EIT Food Accelerator Network (EIT FAN) which Monika says supported them to build their networks and further develop their business skills. As a result of taking part in the programme, uFraction8 secured two industrial pilot trails and was awarded €100,000 to help scale its solutions.
“We're extremely happy to have EIT Food on our side while we develop and grow and we're looking forward to more to come in our future together.”
