Insect protein producer Protenga has raised USD 2 million (EUR 1.8 million) in a venture debt facility.
The Singapore-based company plans to use the funds to develop a series of “next-generation” insect farms in Malaysia, which will supply insect-based ingredients for the aquaculture, animal feed, and petfood sectors. The farms will also provide organic fertilizers to Southeast Asia region to enhance soil quality and crop production.
The company’s new processing facility will focus on Protenga’s petfood brand, YumGrubs. The facility will also provide co-manufacturing services for other brands, with a view to boosting the growth of the insect-based petfood sector, Protenga said in a press release.
"The investment is a strong validation of the team’s hard work and our unique approach to make insect farming accessible and radically scalable. We have demonstrated our technology to farm insects and we are ready to scale to have a global impact,” Protenga Founder and CEO Leo Wein said. “Accessing debt financing starts our journey of bringing insect farming from being predominantly equity-financed to a broader set of financing options such as infrastructure financing or conventional bank loans and decouples the expansion of our physical production facilities from our equity-based growth investments in our technology and commercialization platform.”
In 2020, Protenga had already raised USD 2 million (EUR 1.83 million) in a seed funding round to build three production facilities. The company said it produces double-digit tonnage of products monthly, but used less than a third of the investment capital of comparable companies in the industry. Its production rose tenfold last year to reach installed capacity, been assisted by its own data-driven production system to ensure consistency, visibility, and improvement across its value chain, Protenga said.
Photo courtesy of Protenga
