French industrial biotech company Afyren announced a capital increase of €21m in a financing round led by Sofinnova Partners and Valquest Partners to scale up its biobased organic acid production to industrial scale.
Together with its historical shareholders AFY Partners and Sofimac Régions Afyren has raised more than €60m to move its zero-waste fermentation technology dubbed Afynerie into industrial development phase. The company currently produces seven organic acids from non-food derived sugar on pre-industrial scale. The capital increase is combined with a programme to finance the company‘s first commercial-scale plant - a 1,000m3 fermentation plant with an annual production capacity of 15,000 litres of acetic acid, proprionic acid, butyric acid, isobutyric acid, valeric acid, iso-valeric, or caproic acid and high-value compounds derived thereof by green chemistry.
Along with the €21m capital increase, co-investors Supernova, Crédit Agricole Création and Crédit Agricole Centre France entered Afyren's Board.
The proceeds will enable Afyren to take its industrial project forward through to full commercialisation. After the company launched a 3m3 pilot plant in 2015 that converted non-food-derived sugars from its partner Cristal Union, it installed a 70m3 preindustrial plant to optimise the product purification process to yield products in 99% purity. “Today, we possess good pre-industrial phase technology that we have been working on for several years and that has enabled us to deliver test batches to our first customers," stated Nicolas Sordet, CEO of Afyren.
According to Afyren, its fermentation platform allows the production of organic building blocks, previously exclusively available by peroleum-based conversion. Using a zero-waste approach, Afyren uses sugars derived from different types of second generation biomass into the seven carbon acids to target the cosmetics, flavours and fragrances markets, as well as the human and animal nutrition markets, and even the production of fine chemicals.
Company co-founder Jérémy Pessiot stressed “we are firmly committed to providing a first class environmental profile, particularly in terms of reducing CO2 emissions, and also competitiveness, enabling industrial customers to replace petroleum-based products with our natural building blocks.”. Michael Krel, Principal at Sofinnova Partners, added: “We have been following Afyren for a long time, and we have been impressed with their achievements over the last 18 months. With this round of financing, Afyren now has the human and financial resources needed to industrialise its technology”.
Founded in 2012 by Régis Nouaille and Jérémy Pessiot, Afyren today has 15 employees at two sites nearby Lyon and Clermont-Ferrand.
