- Geltor recently announced that it has closed a $91.3 million Series B round of funding. These are the details about the funding.
Geltor recently announced that it has closed a $91.3 million Series B round of funding that will drive the global expansion of its Ingredients-as-a-Service platform. This round of funding is aiming to meet the accelerating demand from global CPG companies for sustainable, functional, and 100% animal-free ingredients.
This round of funding was led by future protein pioneer CPT Capital (London, UK) with a significant commitment from WTT Investment Ltd. (Taipei, Taiwan). Existing investors in this round include Cultivian Sandbox, SOSV, and iSelect Fund along with the investment arms of global ingredient technology companies GELITA and Archer Daniels Midland. And new investors include Blue Horizon Ventures, RIT Capital Partners, Humboldt Fund, and Pegasus Tech Ventures. Including this round of funding, the company has raised a total of $116.3 million to date.
Geltor was launched in 2015 to help large and growing global CPG segments including cosmetics & personal care, nutraceuticals, and the food & beverage industries. And its success across global CPG segments reflects consumers’ increasing preference for ethical products as more brands are facing backlash for using animal ingredients and contributing to the growing threat of climate change.
In the past year, global demand for collagen grew by 25% and Geltor saw sales surge for its first products, including animal-free collagens like HumaColl21 and Collume. Despite African Swine Fever and COVID-19 disrupting industrial supply chains, Geltor scaled its fermentation-based technology platform up 100 times and produced hundreds of new proteins to help customers seamlessly turn an idea into a highly effective ingredient quickly and with minimal risk.
KEY QUOTES:
“Our goal is to make it ridiculously easy for iconic brands to build sustainable products. This next stage of growth will allow Geltor to meet the moment our world is facing, as businesses recognize the urgent need to transition to a sustainable protein supply chain. We’re grateful to have investors who see Geltor as an index of this important shift to a system powered by fermentation and plant-based platforms like ours. As a scientist, I’m convinced that the highest-impact action I can take to support human and planetary health is making our Ingredients-as-a-Service™ platform better every single day.”
— Geltor CEO and co-founder Alex Lorestani
“Having established the success of our biodesign platform, we are now able to work even more closely with customers to develop unique tailored bioactive ingredients for their specific product needs. We’ve only scratched the surface of what our technology can unlock for our clients at unprecedented speed.”
— Geltor Chief Technology Officer and co-founder Nick Ouzounov.
“Since its founding, Geltor has focused on developing an industrial strength Ingredients-as-a-Service™ platform based on the fundamental principles of functionality, breadth, scale, and speed to meet the pace of customer innovation in multiple end markets. We’re excited to leverage our strong balance sheet and investor base to scale business and manufacturing operations around the core platform to meet global protein demands for decades to come.”
— Geltor Chief Financial Officer Sachin Kelkar
“We see huge market potential for Geltor’s protein platform across categories from cosmetics to food. We are excited by the speed and skill with which they are building out their capabilities. Even more so, in light of the havoc wreaked by COVID-19 on protein supply chains globally, we believe Geltor is laying the foundations for the sustainable, resilient, protein supply chain of the future.”
— Costa Yiannoulis, CPT Capital Investment Director and Geltor Board Director.
