Farmless, a Dutch fermentation start-up, has raised €4.8 million in a funding round co-led by World Fund and Vorwerk Ventures, with participation from Revent.

The company brews ‘planet-friendly’ functional proteins with a complete amino acid profile, using a feedstock made from carbon dioxide, water, nitrogen and renewable energy. Its fermentation platform allows for local protein production independent from climate and agricultural land.

Using the funds raised from the seed round, Farmless plans to build a pilot protein brewery in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, develop its fermentation platform and continue the process of regulatory approval.

According to Farmless, it can brew proteins with up to 5000 times less land than beef and significantly reduce demand for animal products as well as encouraging reforestation, reversing biodiversity loss and reducing gigatons of carbon.

The company’s mission is to free protein production from animals and agricultural land by building a fermentation platform with the potential to create an entirely new food repertoire. Its team of scientists has already created an initial product that can be used to create successors to meat, dairy and eggs.

Farmless has designed its platform to outperform animal-based proteins on economics, aiming to provide an affordable, simple and efficient solution from the ground up.

Adnan Oner, Farmless’ founder and CEO, said: “In today’s unpredictable world, where climate change threatens crop yields, our fermentation platform offers an antifragile solution for food security. This allows any country to take control of their protein production, without the need for fertile land.”

“If we unlock the protein-producing powers of the microbial kingdoms we can create a future worth getting excited about. We can have an abundant, cruelty-free food supply and rewild the world, restore forests, all while drawing down gigatonnes of CO2 from the air.”

Oner added that investor interest in the funding round had been “overwhelming,” and that the company has found investors that share its “sense of urgency in creating dramatically better ways of producing proteins on a planetary scale”.

Nadine Geiser, principal at World Fund, said that moving away from sugar as a feedstock for fermentation represents a “significant opportunity to reduce CO2 emissions of fermentation-based food production”.

She added: “At World Fund, we only invest in startups with the greatest climate performance potential – and there is a significant need to reduce emissions in the farming, agriculture and land use category (FALU)”.

“The FALU category is responsible for around 22% of emissions globally, but receives just 12% of venture funding for climate, so it’s critical we back more startups like Farmless, which has the potential to drastically reduce land use from agriculture, and to improve biodiversity globally.”

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