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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Deep Branch

Deep Branch Raises €8M to Turn Air Into Animal Feed

Deep Branch, which calls itself “a carbon dioxide recycling company,” announced today that it has completed a Series A investment round of €8 million (~$9.5 million USD). The round was led by Novo Holdings and DSM Venturing and also included participation from Total Carbon Neutrality Ventures and Barclays Sustainable Impact Capital. 

The funding will go towards completing Deep Branch’s Scale-Up Hub, a production facility at the Brightlands Chemlot Campus in the Netherlands where the company will make the first pilot-scale batches of its Proton product.

Proton is Deep Branch’s alternative protein ingredient for animal feed, and a product that aims to help make the animal farming industry more sustainable. Via a gas fermentation process, the company turns CO2 into a protein ingredient that Deep Branch says is comparable in nutritional profile to fishmeal, which is a standard in the animal feed industry. It is also, the company says, cost-competitive with other types of animal feed on the market.

Batches of Proton will first be validated nutritionally with Europe’s leading feed producers BioMar (a large aquafeed producer) and AB Agri (a poultry feed producer). 

The new funding will also go towards designing the UK-headquartered company’s first commercial-scale production facility. For now, Deep Branch is focused on finding the right location for that facility, with Norway a top contender. The goal is for the company to reach commercial production of Proton by 2023. 

Creating protein ingredients via gas fermentation is small-but-growing space that also includes Air Protein, Solar Foods, and NovoNutrients. Like Deep Branch, NovoNutrients also makes alternative animal feed by turning industrial CO2 waste into protein.  

Deep Branch has also in the past received funding from Innovate UK, Municipality of Rotterdam, and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research program.

Deep Branch Secures €2.5M to Scale Up Production of Novel Protein Using CO2 Inputs

Alternative protein company Deep Branch has secured €2.5 million (~$2.9 million USD) in new funding from the European Investment Council (EIC) Accelerator to scale up production of the company’s novel, single-cell protein called Proton. The funding will be used to build a production facility in the Netherlands that the company hopes will be operational by Q2 of next year, according to a release sent to The Spoon.

The announcement comes just months after Deep Branch secured government funding from the UK through an organization called the UK Research & Innovation (UKRI), which funded nine projects to the tune of $30 million to help advance zero-emission farming and greater food sovereignty within the UK.

One of those projects is REACT-FIRST, which is a consortium centered around Deep Branch’s technology that creates protein using CO2 inputs from industrial emissions. Deep Branch, which has developed an animal feed formula using its novel single-cell protein that has a nutritional profile similar to that of fishmeal, was working with nine other partners as part of REACT-FIRST to create a sustainable protein research and production value chain.

With today’s news, Deep Branch is expanding to mainland Europe as part of an effort to accelerate the scaling of production for the company’s novel protein. The new funding will help the company build out a production facility at the Netherlands-based Brightlands Chemelot Campus, a European hub focused on providing space and infrastructure for circular chemistry and chemical processes. The new facility will, according to the release, “enable Deep Branch to scale up increasing production to enable animal feed manufacturers to expedite performance testing of the new protein.”

“Brightlands Chemelot Campus is the ideal location for our Scale-Up Centre, and there is a clear alignment between our goals and the facility’s overall ambitions for CO2 recycling and sustainable hydrogen use,”said Deep Branch CEO Peter Rowe in the release. “The industrial site gives us the ability to scale up quickly and has room for a large-scale production facility as well as the raw materials to create Proton. We have access to everything we need.”

Deep Branch will be working with feed producers BioMar and AB Agri as part of the scale up and optimization.

“Setting up the pilot plant represents an important next step in finding the perfect recipe for Proton that meets the requirements of feed producers,” said Rowe.

Deep Branch is one of a small cohort of new startups that have launched over the past few years focused on developing protein using a process called gas fermentation. (Check out Spoon Plus report on the topic here.) Others include Air Protein, Solar Foods and NovoNutrients. Last year, the European Space Agency started working with Solar Foods to develop the technology for use in space to feed astronauts.