Nine months after its first 1.8 million euros funding campaign, YNSECT, “The Insect Company”, a company specialized in insect biotechnology, has raised another 5.5 million euros. YNSECT is on its way to become a European and World leader in the insect field.
The world is facing a major challenge: the food demand is expected to double by 2050, and current methods for agriculture and aquaculture will be insufficient to respond the demand. The situation is worrying with our need for fossil fuels. Faced with this anticipated scarcity of resources and protein, insect production and transformation may be a viable solution, although it has not yet been achieved on an industrial scale.
In 2011, YNSECT was created to develop Entoraffinerie, an insect biorefinery. This one-of-a-kind technological solution combines industrial-scale insect farming with their transformation into useful molecules for the nutritional and green chemistry markets. Over the past 9 months, the company has successfully rolled out a pilot Entoraffinerie project, which received the 2030 Global Innovation Award.
This time, NEW PROTEIN CAPITAL, a financial company based in Singapore, has joined YNSECT alongside current investors, EMERTEC Gestion and DEMETER PARTNERS, who were also involved in the campaign.
YNSECT will use this latest funding campaign to confirm advancements in this new industrial field for products biosourced from insects. This campaign also strengthens its position internationally, particularly in Asia, with a Singaporean investment firm as a new equity partner. In 2015, the company will accelerate its R&D work in a new 1700m² facility at Genopole in Evry, begin industrialising its processes and continue its strategy to develop partnerships with manufacturing companies abroad.
“YNSECT has chosen a high-tech path to deal with the problem of animal protein shortages in the world, a result of exponentially increasing demands and limited production capacities. The ability to suggest highly innovative and economically viable strategies was what immediately attracted us to the YNSECT team. Faced with the agricultural and environmental challenges of the next few years, we believe that YNSECT is a potential world leader in research and industrial capacity for this new sector”, declared Matthieu Vermersch, founder of NEW PROTEIN CAPITAL.