Quakenbrück-based BIOWEG, in partnership with Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin), has secured €1.5 million to help the event of its waste-to-value platform tech for water-based Uncommon Earth Factor (REE) restoration.
The funding comes from SPRIND, Germany’s Federal Company for Disruptive Innovation, as a part of the Tech Metallic Transformation Problem; the goal of which is to develop and validate progressive processes for recovering important metals from complicated waste streams.
Dr Prateek Mahalwar, BIOWEG’s co-founder and CEO, mentioned, “The funding from SPRIND will permit us to speed up the event of a sustainable and bio-based REE restoration platform in collaboration with TU Berlin. It’s constructed on BIOWEG’s experience of waste stream primarily based fermentation platform and inexperienced chemistry, extending the appliance of capabilities we already use at scale in bacterial cellulose manufacturing.”
2025 has proven a gentle circulation of early-stage capital into bio-based, fermentation and sustainable supplies applied sciences throughout Europe.
In Denmark, EvodiaBio raised €6 million to scale its yeast-based fermentation platform for producing pure flavours for the beverage {industry}. Germany additionally featured on this panorama via Kynda, which secured €3 million in Seed funding to advance fungal protein manufacturing utilizing fermentation processes. Within the adjoining sustainable supplies house, Finland-based Fiberdom raised €3.5 million to additional develop plastic-free, wood-fibre-based supplies geared toward round financial system purposes.
Mixed, these 2025 rounds quantity to roughly €12.5 million invested into fermentation-driven and bio-based materials applied sciences, offering context for BIOWEG’s €1.5 million funding to develop its waste-to-value platform for REE restoration.
BIOWEG, based in 2019 by Dr Prateek Mahalwar and Srinivas Karuturi, makes use of precision fermentation and inexperienced chemistry to create high-performance, bio-based and biodegradable substances that exchange deliberately added microplastics and fossil-derived polymers.
By changing food-industry facet streams into high-purity bacterial cellulose and tailoring it into practical supplies, BIOWEG helps reformulation in private care, residence care and agriculture.
The fermentation techniques that underpin BIOWEG’s bacterial cellulose substances for cosmetics and private care additionally generate bio-based acids as a secondary output, which is directed into different high-impact purposes utilizing secondary fermentation.
The corporate operates an illustration website in Quakenbrück, Germany and a formulation, materials science and purposes lab in Monheim on the Bayer Crop Science campus. BIOWEG’s product households embrace Micbeads (micro-powders), RheoWeg (rheology management) and AgriWeg (seed and fertiliser coatings).
Professor Juri Rappsilber of TU Berlin provides: “This partnership permits us to bridge the hole between elementary analysis inside the UniSysCat Cluster of Excellence and industrial-scale software. By leveraging the ideas of Inexperienced Chemistry, we’re combining our world-leading peptide innovation with BIOWEG’s fermentation experience to create a very round answer for Europe’s metals sector.”
Regardless of REE demand surging in Europe because of an explosion in demand for electrical automobiles, wind generators and client electronics, BIOWEG believes the EU faces harmful provide dangers because of geographically-concentrated world manufacturing.
Standard REE restoration processes are extremely energy-intensive, depend on solvents, and generate giant portions of poisonous waste. These strategies are additionally non-selective, environmentally dangerous, and economically unsustainable for widespread round use in Europe.
BIOWEG has made progress in growing a substitute for the present high-energy, waste-intensive and non-selective restoration platform.
The platform know-how combines BIOWEG’s experience in bioacid manufacturing from waste streams for bioleaching with TU Berlin’s peptide-based separation know-how utilizing column techniques. The method operates in water at ambient temperature, making use of green-chemistry bioleaching with out using solvents or excessive warmth.
The bio-based acids are generated as a secondary output of BIOWEG’s fermentation platform, requiring no further downstream processing, leading to a low-energy course of with a diminished total CO₂ footprint.
Alongside its established bacterial cellulose substances for cosmetics and private care, the corporate applies the identical waste-stream platform to further purposes the place selective chemistry and low-energy processes can reportedly unlock considerably increased worth.
