ufraction8, a Scottish biotech company funded by the EIC, has closed an investment round that landed them with around €3 million (£2.5 million). This new funding will help the company to continue the development and improvement of their innovative solution, an industrial scale micro-filtration system.
With a vision to make sustainable manufacturing with biology affordable, ufraction8’s cutting edge technology harnesses the power of microfluidics to enable gentle separation of cell-based products from liquid in which they are grown. Since its incorporation in 2017, the company has been steadily growing and increasing their reach. In 2019, uFraction8 opened a fully owned subsidiary in Poznan, Poland, and has continuously been able to attract investment from both public and private sources.
This past January, the biotech company successfully finalised an investment round of approximately €3 million, led by Thia Ventures. According to ufraction8’s Co-founder & CEO, Monika Tomecka, this funding round will “enable uFraction8 to expand our existing facilities in Scotland and in Poland, to substantially grow the team, and to deploy large-scale tests with prospective customers. The main technical milestones enabled by this round are to achieve the final scale-up of the technology, progress from prototyping ways of production and to demonstrate production for manufacturability at scale.”. Furthermore, the company is looking to work on their customer pool and explore new partnership opportunities: “uFraction8 is currently at the phase of dynamic growth and customer demonstrations. In the next 12 to 18 months, we aim to expand our customer engagement pool and perform several pilot tests and industrial demonstrations. We continue to actively look for industrial partners willing to test uFraction8 instruments with their products.”
Monika added that this funding round brought not only money to the company, but also the security of partnering with experienced investors: “We believe that we found amazing, long-term partners who provide uFraction8 with much more than just financing. Provided by those knowledgeable investors, their bio-manufacturing expertise alongside their long history of supporting biotech companies will enable uFraction8 to grow faster than ever before. Thia and Blue Horizon are the perfect matches for uFraction8.”.
uFraction8 received a Phase 1 grant from the European Innovation Council to explore the techno-economic feasibility of using multiplexed microfluidic arrays for harvesting of microbial cell cultures to enable sustainable bioproduction.
DISCLAIMER: This information is provided in the interest of knowledge sharing and should not be interpreted as the official view of the European Commission, or any other organisation.