Australian startup Uluu has secured over €7 million in Series A funding to build a demonstration plant for the industrial production of its materials, a home compostable seaweed alternative to plastic.
The funding round was led by German growth investor Burda Principal Investments with support from Main Sequence, Novel Investments, Startmate and impact and family investors such as Fairground and Trinity Ventures. Other backers of the startup include Tame Impala musician Kevin Parker and Glastonbury Festival director Melvin Benn.
Uluu utilizes a ‘carbon-neutral’ fermentation process to turn farmed seaweed into polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), said to perform like conventional plastic and able to be processed using existing plastic manufacturing equipment. Uluu says its materials are home compostable and marine biodegradable.
The materials are also said to be lightweight, waterproof and non-toxic while being climate positive at scale. At commercial scale, Uluu states that its production process has scope to capture and store up to 5kgs of CO2 for every 1kg of material produced, and the technology has the potential to reduce global CO2 emissions by more than 2 gigatonnes per year.
With the Series A raise, Uluu plans to scale from its 100kg per year pilot facility to a 10-tonne per year demonstration plant in Western Australia, enabling the company to deliver commercial volumes to customers. The company adds that it is already collaborating with global partners in cosmetics, fashion and the automotive industry, including Quiksilver, Papinelle and Audi.
In similar news, last year B’Zeos received over €5 million in total raised equity and grant funding to help scale up its compostable seaweed-based packaging, through a seed round led by Faber and supported by International Chemical Investors Group (ICIG)’s venture capital unit. The seaweed-based solutions are reportedly fully biobased, home-compostable and compatible with existing packaging production lines.
In other funding news, Yangi recently secured €10 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round to industrialize its dry forming technology for fibre packaging at scale, led by venture capital fund Industrifonden. Yangi’s Cellera is designed to offer packaging producers and brands a scalable, renewable alternative to fossil-based plastics, said to be validated and industrially available.
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