Green Bioactives (GBL) has completed a £2.6 million ($3.1 million) seed financing round, which it says will accelerate its production, management, capabilities, and research team.

According to GBL – a firm that focuses on the sustainable manufacture of natural products from plant cell cultures – it will use the funding round led by Eos Advisory LLP and others to follow sector-specific partnerships, increase product sales, up its marketing activity, and establish intellectual property (IP) across the company’s core biomanufacturing process and plant cell lines.

“This $3.1 million seed funding is an incredibly exciting milestone for Green Bioactives, and we’re delighted to have attracted such a strong international investor base – demonstrating the global commercial potential of our plant cell culture-based biomanufacturing platform,” said David McElroy, CEO of GBL.

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“The investment comes at a key time for the company, as we prepare for further growth and continue to develop our technology, working towards our goal of becoming the world’s leading supplier of safe, natural and sustainably-sourced plant-derived products.”

The firm claims it will scale its platform to allow for more environmentally sustainable and commercially feasible manufacture of plant-derived products, which can be applied across various global industries.

“Traditional plant harvesting and processing for valuable natural product extraction can be uneconomic (due to low yield), unsustainable and unreliable. The use of our plant cell culture based biomanufacturing platform ensures lower cost production (higher natural product yield) with improved product reliability/sustainability,” McElroy told this publication.

He continued: “Green Bioactives takes the cells responsible for making the target plant bioactives, grows them up in large bioreactors, then isolates the target molecule from the cells – similar to brewing in yeast. Plants often produce these molecules in response to an attack or stress, so the company exposes them to a molecule that mimics this stress to induce them to make the molecule in culture. They focus on isolating primary meristem cells, which are similar are similar across all kinds of different plants.”

Team expansion

To meet said goals, GBL said that it has already started hiring individuals to work across a range of technical and commercial roles in the business.

“The team will be expanded from three co-founders to a staff of almost 20 over the next 24 months focused on recruiting staff in plant cell tissue culture, plant cell culture bioreactor operations and product purification, formulations and sales,” said McElroy.

The company did not disclose who it is currently working with but did reveal that one of its clients is a “multinational biotechnology company developing and selling products for commercial applications in pharmaceuticals, consumer healthcare and agriculture.”

Other investors for the seed round included London-based Regenerate Ventures’, Agtech Fund, London, Scottish Enterprise, and Singapore co-headquartered Milltrust International Group.