AmphiStar Secures €12.5m EIC Fund­ing to Bring its Bios­ur­fact­ants to Market

The blen­ded fund­ing takes the form of a €2.5m grant and a €10m equity invest­ment. AmphiStar is one of only 40 selec­ted bene­fi­ciar­ies shar­ing nearly €230m in sup­port, all recog­nised for their trans­form­at­ive tech­no­lo­gies with strong com­mer­cial poten­tial. The fund­ing will enable AmphiStar to speed up the pro­duc­tion of sus­tain­able micro­bi­al bios­ur­fact­ants, upcycled from a bio-based waste feed­stock, and ulti­mately bring them to market.

The new fund­ing fol­lows €12m pre­vi­ously raised through CBE-JU pro­jects (Waste2Func, Surf­sUP), region­al grants (VLAIO) and the early and dis­rupt­ive sup­port of the Ger­man SPRIN‑D and Ghent based Biotope in addi­tion to a pre-series A fund­ing round closed in 2024 by three exper­i­enced VC funds (ECBF, Qbic, PMV).

This fund­ing suc­cess enables us to take the next steps in AmphiStar’s jour­ney to com­mer­cial­isa­tion. We now look for­ward not only to fur­ther scal­ing pro­duc­tion of our com­mer­cially avail­able products (Amphi­CareⓇ and AmphiCleanⓇ), but also to bring­ing a first nov­el bios­ur­fact­ant from our bios­ur­fact­ant plat­form tech­no­logy to mar­ket while expand­ing our range of products bey­ond our cur­rent per­son­al care and home care offer­ings.” said AmphiStar COO Soph­ie Roelants.

AmphiStar’s syn­thet­ic bio­logy plat­form is designed to enable the cre­ation of molecules tailored to meet the per­form­ance and beha­viour require­ments of spe­cif­ic applic­a­tions. By upcyc­ling bio-based waste and side streams as feed­stocks for its fer­ment­a­tion pro­cess, AmphiStar offers a clean­er altern­at­ive to com­mon syn­thet­ic sur­fact­ants. It also avoids the use of vir­gin crops such as palm oil or sug­ar as feed­stock, whose cul­tiv­a­tion is asso­ci­ated with defor­est­a­tion and hab­it­at loss while requir­ing extens­ive inputs of land, chem­ic­als and fossil resources.

This suc­cess with­in the highly com­pet­it­ive open EIC call affirms the tech­no­lo­gic­al excel­lence of AmphiStar’s team and is a test­a­ment to EIC’s belief in AmphiStar’s abil­ity to redefine sur­fact­ants using bio-based alternatives.

This fund­ing reflects the con­fid­ence that EIC has in AmphiStar’s abil­ity to trans­form one of the key chem­ic­al mar­kets. With grow­ing con­sumer pres­sure on industry to offer less harm­ful products, the fin­an­cial sup­port ensures that we will con­tin­ue to lead the way in repla­cing envir­on­ment­ally dam­aging syn­thet­ic sur­fact­ants with bio-based altern­at­ives that retain func­tion­al­ity and per­form­ance while being kind to people and our wider eco­sys­tem.” said AmphiStar CEO Pierre-Franck Valentin.

The envir­on­ment­al sus­tain­ab­il­ity of AmphiStar’s bios­ur­fact­ants was con­firmed by a recent Life Cycle Ana­lys­is (LCA) which demon­strated that their pro­duc­tion res­ults in a fourfold reduc­tion in glob­al warm­ing poten­tial com­pared to non-upcycled sophorol­ipids, a six­fold reduc­tion com­pared to syn­thet­ic Sodi­um Laureth Sulfate, and a 9.5‑fold reduc­tion com­pared to Amine Oxides. Addi­tion­ally, they require sig­ni­fic­antly less water and land and have sub­stan­tially decreased impacts on human health, eco­sys­tem qual­ity and resource availability.

In July 2024 AmphiStar released its first bios­ur­fact­ant products for the home and per­son­al care mar­kets (AmphiClean™ and Amphi­Care™), and this year unveiled its grow­ing lib­rary of over 80 bios­ur­fact­ant molecules, suit­able for a wide vari­ety of applic­a­tions. AmphiStar built on these suc­cesses by sign­ing a stra­tegic agree­ment with Illinois-based sur­fact­ant man­u­fac­turer Kens­ing to bring its bios­ur­fact­ants and pro­duc­tion tech­no­logy to the North Amer­ic­an mar­ket and is final­ising agree­ments with European coun­ter­parts – more news to fol­low in the near future.