Fermeate, an industrial biotechnology company developing optogenetic control for industrial-scale precision fermentation, today announced a successful $2 million Seed round led by Newfund Capital with participation from SOSV, Ajinomoto Group Ventures, Ki Tua Fund, Heuristic Capital Partners, Momentum Capital, Plug & Play, Tesserakt Ventures, and Ag Startup Engine. The funding will support Fermeate's mission to transform unit economics and enable cost parity for precision fermentation products.

"Until now, the fermentation industry has largely relied on scale to reduce costs," said Kevin Xu, Co-Founder and CEO. "We take a different approach, unlocking more outputs from existing reactors with minimal capital investment and a typical payback period of under 11 months based on third-party TEAs."

Even highly optimized microbes can lose significant productivity over the course of an industrial fermentation run, reducing outputs and limiting efficiency. Fermeate enables real-time control of metabolism, using light as a signal to activate/deactivate gene expression with precise and dynamic control, allowing operators to influence microbial behavior during production. Fermeate combines this light-based control with artificial intelligence to identify which genes to target and when, improving fermentation outputs by 60% to 300% (based on results from existing industrial collaborations).

The core technology is plug-and-play with existing fermentation facilities, converting stainless-steel fermenters to optogenetically enabled systems at less than 5% the cost of installing new tanks.

Since founding, Fermeate has expanded its compatible microbial chassis to support most widely used industrial hosts, including conventional and non-conventional yeast and bacteria species. Today, the company is engaged in partnerships with four global food and ingredient companies, successfully demonstrating performance improvements within the first three months, and up to 200% increase in protein production within six months.

"Every major industrial transformation is built on a foundational infrastructure layer, and the bio-economy will be no exception. What makes Fermeate stand out is that their optogenetic platform upgrades the world's existing fermentation capacity rather than replacing it — precisely the kind of horizontal, enabling technology Newfund has consistently backed," said Henri Deshays, General Partner at Newfund Capital.

About Fermeate:
Fermeate is an industrial biotechnology company using light to control gene expression during fermentation, enabling improved unit economics without requiring new infrastructure. Founded in 2024 by Kevin Xu and Saurabh Malani, both PhD alumni of the Avalos Lab at Princeton University. Learn more at fermeate.com.

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