Paris' baCta haalt €7 miljoen op om micro-organismen te gebruiken als programmeerbare moleculaire fabrieken voor industriële ingrediënten

Parisian biotech startup baCta has secured €7 million in Seed funding, signalling a significant advancement in the industrial production of essential ingredients. This investment underscores a growing trend in Europe towards leveraging advanced technology, particularly AI, to build more resilient and sustainable supply chains. The company's mission to transform microorganisms into programmable molecular factories for synthesizing organic molecules at scale is poised to reshape the industrial ingredient landscape. baCta's innovative approach integrates synthetic biology, robotics, and generative AI to engineer microorganisms for high-yield production. By exploring previously overlooked genomic areas, the company claims to design optimized strains with unprecedented speed, utilizing bio-based reinforcement learning to reduce development timelines and costs. Their inaugural product, astaxanthin, an antioxidant with wide applications, aims to provide a natural, drop-in replacement for current synthetic or expensively extracted alternatives, promising competitive unit economics and premium quality. This development is particularly relevant to Europe's push for digital sovereignty and industrial independence. By offering sustainable, bio-based alternatives to petrochemical-derived ingredients, baCta contributes to reducing reliance on volatile global supply chains and promoting a circular economy. The fresh capital will enable baCta to scale astaxanthin production, validate industrial processes, and expand its AI-driven strain engineering platform, baCtaForge, further solidifying Europe's position in cutting-edge biotechnological innovation.