Investors backing the business include Baillie Gifford, Cox Enterprises, Durable Capital Partners, Fidelity, Endeavor Catalyst and actor Ryan Reynolds. Reuters reported that the listing could value Bending Spoons at around €17 billion ($20 billion), although the company has not confirmed a target valuation.

“We see a vast opportunity ahead. We’ve identified more than 1,000 digital businesses (both private and public) that could be attractive acquisition targets in the future,” Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari wrote in a letter attached to the IPO prospectus.

The IPO filing comes after a period of rapid growth for the Italian company. During 2025, EU-Startups saw Bending Spoons …

• Raise over €500 million
• Acquire Vimeo in €1.1 billion cash deal 
• Acquire Eventbrite in €430 million all-cash deal

Founded in 2013 by CEO Luca Ferrari alongside co-founders Matteo Danieli, Francesco Patarnello and Luca Querella, the company has evolved from a mobile app developer into a major consolidator of digital businesses, building a portfolio that spans some of the internet’s best-known consumer and software brands.

Unlike many European startups that focus on developing a single flagship product, Bending Spoons has built its business around acquiring established digital companies and attempting to improve their performance through operational changes, subscription-based monetisation and technology-driven efficiencies.

Over the past several years, the company has completed more than 50 acquisitions, including notable brands such as Eventbrite, Vimeo, WeTransfer, Evernote, Komoot, AOL, Brightcove and StreamYard.

According to its filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Bending Spoons generated. €1.13 billion ($1.31 billion) in revenue during 2025, representing substantial growth compared to previous years.

The company reported revenue of €520 million ($601 million) during the first quarter of 2026, an increase of more than 130% compared to the same period a year earlier. Net profit for the quarter reached approximately €23.8 million ($27.5 million), reversing a loss recorded in the corresponding period of 2025.

Subscription revenue continues to underpin the business model. The company disclosed that recurring subscriptions accounted for the overwhelming majority of its revenue, highlighting the growing importance of recurring income streams across digital services and software businesses.

Bending Spoons also reported serving more than 500 million monthly active users across its portfolio in March 2026, including more than 9 million paying customers.

Rather than focusing solely on organic expansion, Bending Spoons typically acquires companies that it believes are underperforming or facing operational challenges. It then implements restructuring measures, introduces new pricing strategies and seeks to improve profitability.

While this approach has delivered strong financial growth, it has also generated debate due to the substantial workforce reductions that have often followed acquisitions.

The company’s prospectus also highlights the growing role of AI within its operations. Bending Spoons stated that AI tools are increasingly being used across software development, customer support, hiring and analytics functions.

The business claims that a large proportion of software code changes are now generated or supported by AI systems, reflecting a broader trend among technology companies seeking productivity gains through automation.

Should the offering proceed as expected, Bending Spoons would become one of the most prominent European technology companies to list in the United States in recent years.

For the broader European startup ecosystem, the listing could serve as another indicator that companies founded on the continent are increasingly capable of reaching global scale.

Whether Bending Spoons can continue its rapid expansion while operating under the scrutiny of public markets remains to be seen, but its Nasdaq ambitions mark another notable chapter in the rise of one of Europe’s most unconventional technology success stories.

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More than 94% of students are now using AI to help them prepare for assessments, according to the 2026 HEPI student generative AI survey, which means they want study tools to do more than store content. They want help understanding key ideas, reviewing faster, and checking what they know.

That matters because students do not just need access to content. They need help making sense of it. Notes, slides, readings, and recordings often sit across different formats, with key ideas buried inside long documents or fast-moving lectures. Studocu AI uses NLP and AI to solve four common study problems: information overload, confusing terminology, passive revision, and hard-to-review lectures.

What does NLP mean in this context?

Natural Language Processing, or NLP, helps computers work with language in a more useful way. Instead of only matching exact words, it looks at meaning and context.

That matters in education because the same word can mean different things in different subjects. A term like “derivative” means one thing in calculus and another in finance. NLP helps a system use the surrounding text to understand which meaning fits. In study tools, this makes results more relevant and explanations more useful.

How does Studocu help students handle too much information?

Students are often asked to read more than they can fully absorb in one sitting. Long readings can feel overwhelming, especially when they are dense, technical, or full of detail.

Studocu’s AI Notes feature helps by turning long documents into shorter, clearer notes. Instead of pulling random lines, it works across the full text to identify the main ideas and how they connect.

The result is a structured summary that is easier to review. Students can see the key concepts, people, events, or arguments first, then go deeper where needed. That helps them start with a clearer overview and use study time better.

How does Studocu explain difficult terms in the right context?

Many academic terms are hard because their meaning changes by subject. When students look them up on a general website, they may get an answer that does not match their course.

Studocu’s Study Assistant works inside the material a student is already reading. When a student highlights a section and asks for help, the tool uses the surrounding content to understand the topic and context.

That makes the explanation more relevant to the page in front of the student. It also helps students stay focused. They do not need to switch tabs, search elsewhere, or sort through definitions that do not fit the class.

How does Studocu turn passive review into active practice?

Rereading notes can feel productive, but it does not always show what a student actually remembers. Practice works better because it forces recall, which helps students spot gaps in understanding.

Studocu helps by turning study materials into quizzes and mock exams. It reads the source content, pulls out key ideas and facts, and uses them to build questions students can answer on their own.

This gives students a faster way to move from passive review to active practice. Instead of reading the same PDF again, they can test themselves, find weak areas, and go back to the right material.

How does Lecture Recording make spoken content easier to study?

A lot of important learning happens in live lectures, where students have to listen, think, and take notes at the same time. That makes it easy to miss useful details.

Studocu’s Lecture Recording feature helps capture that spoken content and turn it into something easier to review. It converts lecture audio into text, cleans up the transcript, and helps organise the material into clearer notes. Students can also upload an existing recording.

That gives them a more searchable and structured version of what was said in class. It also helps them stay present during the lecture, knowing they can come back later to review the material in a more usable format.

Why does the academic library make these AI tools more useful?

These features depend on more than strong models. They also depend on having relevant academic material to work with.

Studocu’s AI works with a large library of student-shared study materials organized by university, course, and subject. That gives the system more academic context than a general tool pulling from broad web content.

This matters because better context leads to more relevant output. If a student works from a course-linked anatomy guide, for example, the notes, explanations, and practice questions are more likely to feel connected to what they are actually studying.

Why does this approach matter for students?

The value of AI in education is not just speed. It is whether the tool helps students do real study tasks with less friction.

On Studocu, that looks practical. Long files become clearer notes. Difficult terms get explained in context. Static documents turn into quizzes. Lectures become searchable study material.

That is what makes the experience feel useful at scale. Students spend less time sorting through content and more time understanding it, reviewing it, and preparing with confidence.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How does AI help when a student does not know what part of the material is important yet?

A: AI can help surface the main ideas first, which gives students a clearer starting point. That is especially useful when a reading feels dense or unfamiliar.

Q: Can NLP still be useful if the study materials are poorly organised?

A: Yes, one of its main strengths is helping make sense of scattered or messy content by identifying patterns, topics, and relationships across the material.

Q: Why is this kind of AI more useful in education than a standard document search tool?

A: A search tool helps students find words. AI and NLP can go further by helping them understand what those words mean in context and why they matter.

Q: What makes study support feel faster without feeling rushed?

A: The goal is not just speed. It is reducing low-value effort, like sorting files or rewriting notes, so students can spend more time actually learning.

Q: How does AI support students who study in short bursts instead of long sessions?

A: Clear notes, quick explanations, and ready-made practice questions make it easier to study in smaller windows of time without losing momentum.

The post How Studocu uses NLP and AI to solve learning challenges at scale (Sponsored) appeared first on EU-Startups.

The round was led by Voyager Ventures, with leading angel investors including David Kirk (former Chief Scientist at NVIDIA), Lawrence Leuschner (co-founder and former CEO of TIER Mobility), and the family office Custos participating in the round. The round also received continued backing from Atlantic.vc, Lifeline Ventures, LGF and Illusian.

Anatolii Papulov, CEO and co-founder of NewOrbit, said, “For sixty years, VLEO has been treated as too hostile an environment for commercial satellites — but it is in fact the most valuable empty real estate in space. Today, no one in the industry has a reliable, affordable and fast way to fly payloads in very-low Earth orbit. We built our NEO-1 satellite to do exactly that.”

Founded in May 2021, NewOrbit builds satellites for very low Earth orbit (VLEO), a band of near-Earth space at 200–300km historically reserved for spy satellites and the International Space Station. Its mission is to engineer Earth’s lowest orbiting satellite to advance global connectivity and insight. 

The team building NewOrbit includes senior engineers from SpaceX, NASA, Tesla and Airbus. Its advisory board comprises senior figures from the global space industry, such as Jean-Jacques Dordain, Director General of the European Space Agency (2003-2015), and Sir Chris Deverell, former Commander of UK Joint Forces.

According to the company, three forces have rendered VLEO commercially unviable since the dawn of the space age: aerodynamic drag, which pulls spacecraft back to Earth within weeks; atomic oxygen, which corrodes their surfaces; and aerodynamic torques, which destabilise their orientation. 

NewOrbit claims that it has built purpose-engineered satellites, equipped with the company’s in-house propulsion system, to withstand these conditions and operate reliably in VLEO for up to five years.

VLEO’s commercial logic is simple: flying lower improves visibility and connectivity, all at significantly reduced costs. From 200–300 km, NewOrbit states that it will be able to offer the highest-quality satellite imagery available today, at 20x lower cost than conventional satellites, alongside faster data speeds. 

The UK startup believes these advantages could unlock new space economy paradigms, like 5G direct-to-device from space and live HD video, which aren’t possible with current orbital geometry.

Matthew Blain, Partner at Voyager Ventures, said, “VLEO is the next foundational shift in the global space industry. The technology will unlock order of magnitude improvements in earth observation at a fraction of the cost today. We’re proud to partner with NewOrbit on their journey to become the leading provider of commercial VLEO satellites globally.”

With this fresh funding, the company plans to build NewOrbit’s NEO Production Complex, scheduled to open in 2027. The facility will incorporate the company’s first commercial satellite for launch in 2028. This launch will mark the first time commercial customer payloads have been flown at altitudes between 200-300 km 

It will then expand from an initial capacity of ten satellites annually to several per week at full operation, creating the manufacturing foundation necessary to scale up VLEO commercialisation.  At full operation, the company claims that this complex will be Europe’s largest dedicated VLEO production facility and a strategic industrial asset within the continent’s sovereign space ecosystem.

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The round was led by Realyze Ventures (Germany) and Pi Labs (United Kingdom), with participation from Asterion Ventures (France) and existing investors.

Dhruv Gupta, Principal at Pi Labs, said, “Enterprise energy management is moving from static procurement and reporting toward 24×7 real-time optimisation. Large enterprises spending tens of millions annually on energy still rely heavily on spreadsheets, dashboards and manual workflows. Companion has built a deeply technical AI platform that fundamentally changes software from a recommendation engine to a system of execution. This is what makes this category so important.”

Founded in 2022 by Thomas Vyncke and Jonas Verstraeten, Companion.energy helps large industrial and commercial enterprises turn energy from a risk into a competitive advantage. The company states that its software platform gives them complete transparency on their energy economics and runs AI-driven optimisation workflows that improve their contract mix and steer their assets in real time.

According to Thomas Vyncke, co-founder of  Companion.energy, “European energy markets are undergoing a structural shift. As penetration of renewables increases and industrial demand becomes more electrified, electricity markets are becoming significantly more volatile and operationally complex. Energy prices that once moved seasonally now fluctuate in real time. 

“At the same time, enterprises are deploying growing fleets of batteries, solar installations, EV charging infrastructure and electrified industrial systems. Most companies still manage this environment through fragmented tooling, spreadsheets and static procurement processes but they need a system that runs and optimises energy operations continuously.”

Jonas Verstraeten, co-founder of Companion.energy, said, “We started Companion because we believed the energy transition would force every large industrial enterprise to manage energy actively, and that they would not be able to do that with spreadsheets and quarterly check-ins. The work of the next decade is to give those teams software that can keep up. This round lets us bring that software to many more enterprises, and help them turn their energy from a competitiveness risk into a competitive advantage.”

The company states that it connects energy contracts, operational systems and distributed assets into a single optimisation platform that continuously forecasts demand, models market exposure and automates energy decisions in real time. The platform helps enterprises optimise procurement decisions, steer assets dynamically and improve the economics of electrification at scale. 

Companion.energy also notes that, through the platform, clients benefit from autonomous decision-making to maximise energy assets in real time, reducing energy costs by 10–30%.

The company serves more than 30 enterprise customers across Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland, including TotalEnergies, KPN, Port of Antwerp-Bruges, Interparking and Proximus Group. Its customers include manufacturers, logistics operators, telecom operators, EV charging operators, energy companies and other large energy consumers. Over the past year, the company reportedly expanded its customer base and revenue ten times, exceeding €1 million in annual recurring revenue. 

It manages more than 2 TWh of annual energy consumption and production across customer portfolios, representing approximately €500 million in annual energy spend and revenue. Its platform already supports more than 200 MW of distributed energy assets, including solar PV, wind, batteries, e-boilers and EV charging infrastructure

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The round was led by Dutch EnergyTech investor SET Ventures, with Berlin-based ClimateTech fund AENU as co-lead.

Raik Belka, Founder and CEO of GALVANY, said, “We are building the infrastructure that will finally make the heat transition work in the existing-building stock. In Germany, heat pumps do not fail because of the technology, but because of the gap between subsidy bureaucracy, installation capacity, and economic viability for the end customer. 

“This is exactly the gap we are closing — with a platform that makes every link in the chain measurably better while sustaining itself. Closing this round from a profitable position is more than just a metric for us: it is proof that the heat transition is financeable without combustion logic.”

Founded in 2022 by Raik Belka, GALVANY is an end-to-end platform for the heat transition. The company states that it combines sales, procurement, installation, and intelligent operation of heat pump systems in a single system. The platform finances profitable growth, multi-family-home scaling, and AI-powered energy management

At its core are the GALVANY Cube, produced together with Panasonic, and the GALVANY Fusion energy management system. The company’s hardware element is called GALVANY Cube, which is complemented by a modular system architecture in which the heat pump, battery storage, and the GALVANY Fusion energy management system work in concert.

According to the company, in contrast to the market standard, GALVANY relies on a networked platform ecosystem: instead of an expensive direct sales operation, the company integrates acquisition, procurement, installation, and management into a single solution.

It claims that based on dynamic electricity tariffs, load shifting, and spot-market arbitrage, heating and electricity costs are measurably reduced. V1 of the GALVANY app is scheduled for release in the summer, enabling digital control of an entire energy system.

“The next phase of the energy transition will not be decided by hardware, but by the software that intelligently links generation, storage, and consumption. GALVANY is one of the few European companies that consistently thinks this logic through from the end device all the way to the power grid. With the platform and the energy management system, the heat pump evolves from a heating device into an active element of a digitally controlled energy system,” said Dr. Till Stenzel, Partner at SET Ventures.

With this funding, the company plans to focus on the multi-family-home existing-building market and expand the offering for housing companies and portfolio holders. It also plans to further develop GALVANY Fusion as an Agentic Energy OS, which involves further development of the AI-powered energy management system that orchestrates load profiles in real time and translates dynamic electricity tariffs into measurable end-customer savings.

GALVANY also aims to expand partner structures with installation contractors and its own sales organisation to accelerate nationwide platform scaling.

To date, the company has installed more than 2,500 heat pump systems, avoiding over 3,850 tonnes of CO₂. In 2025, GALVANY generated revenue of €20.1 million, a sevenfold increase compared to the previous year, and closed the year with a positive EBIT.

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The firm also announced that KfW Capital (a subsidiary of KfW, Germany’s state-owned promotional bank, which operates on behalf of the federal government and the states) has joined the final close as the fund’s largest investor. Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO) is the Fund’s second-largest investor. Equation Capital, Basecamp (Phoenix Court), JIMCO, and Allocator One have also backed the fund. In total, 71 limited partners from 21 countries have committed to the fund.

“We are glad to join Creator’s newest fund generation, which targets future-focused sectors such as artificial intelligence, BioTech, computer infrastructure, AI-enabled robotics, and advanced materials. By leveraging Creator’s European academic network to access future founders at leading universities, the team addresses a key element of the innovation ecosystem: translating academic progress into high-growth startups,” said Christian Röhle, co-Head of Investment Management at KfW Capital. 

Founded in 2019 by Jamie Macfarlane, Creator Fund partners with scientific founders at the earliest stage, offering support to scale and helping them raise future rounds. It invests across sectors, with a focus on AI, DeepTech, and BioTech. It invests up to €1 million as a first cheque in European startups and typically (but not exclusively) backs teams where a founder is a PhD, student, professor, or recent graduate. The firm is backed by leading VC investors across Europe and the USA. 

The VC firm states that Europe attracts the world’s leading scientists for study, considering them the most vital asset for startup creation on the continent. Unlike other funds, it believes scientists should be in charge. In order to find them early, Creator Fund has built a student team across 30 universities in 10 countries, making them the first investors a PhD student ever speaks to. It also runs a twenty-part Scientific Founder programme that has taken over 250 students step-by-step through founding a company.

With this, Creator Fund claims to become the largest student fund in the world and the first to scale the student-sourcing model across a continent. In Europe, the focus is on DeepTech. The new Fund has made 11 investments across the Netherlands, Hungary, Denmark, Germany, and the UK, including:

Ovo Labs: a BioTech company that emerged from the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen (Germany), reversing the ageing of human eggs and addressing the reason women struggle to have children as they get older.

Latent Worlds: a Delft-based startup building the backend infrastructure for robotics deployments.

Anzen Industries: a London-based startup creating new materials that do not exist in the world through enzyme reactions. 

SPhotonix: a Delaware-based startup storing the world’s data on quartz glass through ultrafast lasers, already used by Elon Musk for his intergalactic library.

Jamie Macfarlane, founder and CEO of Creator Fund, said, “The world’s biggest problems are being solved in European university labs. The scientists working on them are extraordinary but for too long, they’ve been overlooked by venture capital, pushed towards academia rather than building companies. That’s the gap we exist to fill. This fund means we can back more of them, across Europe, than ever before – and make sure the next generation of world-changing companies is built by the people who have invented the science.”

Explaining the modus operandi of Creator Fund’s Scientific Founder programme, the VC firm stated that each year, 40 Venture Fellows are selected from 450 applicants and embedded across 30 universities in 10 countries. They are trained to identify scientific researchers with the potential to build, and to support them through the earliest stages of company formation. Three of the first 11 investments from the new fund were founded by former fellows.

“We are building Europe’s most powerful deep tech talent community. The brightest PhD minds come to Creator Fund to learn how to build companies. They found businesses we back or they join our portfolio as top technical talent. Others go into VC and invest in our companies in follow on rounds. Creator Fund is the single platform enabling university talent to fuel the next frontier of European tech champions,” said Alexandra Ntemourtsidou, COO of Creator Fund. 

Since 2019, the Creator Fund has backed 62 companies. It returned its first fund last year after selling Loci to Epic Games, a company it backed after a founder’s six-second video caught its attention in a Cambridge University lab. In the past six months, two of Creator Fund’s companies have surpassed €86.7 million ($100 million) in total funding.

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The funding is made up of an Innovate UK grant, as well investments from HERmesa Angels, SyndicateRoom, Lavender Ventures, and individual angel investors.

“Products designed for care should never cause harm. That’s not a vision statement. It’s the reason this company exists,” says Zoe Robson, Founder & CEO of Joyvié Health.

And Ruth, his wife and primary caregiver, carried a burden that was invisible to the world outside and impossibly hard to bear.

“My parents didn’t deserve that,” says Zoe. “They were both at their most vulnerable – and the product meant to help them was making it worse. The skin breakdown, the shame, the loss of dignity, the weight on my mum. It wasn’t from lack of care. It’s a design failure.”

The company is on a mission to end the silent humiliation of faecal incontinence (FI) – a condition affecting an estimated 656 million people globally, yet the most common non-invasive solution remains unchanged for decades: nappies and pads.

Where existing non-invasive product traps faeces against the skin, Joyvié contains stool in a disposable pouch immediately after excretion, significantly reducing skin contact, preserving dignity, and reducing the time and burden of care. Early testing shows approximately 90% reduction in stool-to-skin contact and approximately 70% faster changes.

Faecal incontinence is often caused by conditions such as cancer, dementia, MS, Parkinson’s, spinal injury, or ageing, yet remains heavily under-discussed. It disproportionately affects women as both patients and caregivers, with an estimated 70% of unpaid caregivers being women.

The company outlines that the women’s health sector attracts just 2% of healthcare VC funding despite serving half the population – mirroring statistics that show that women-founded startups receive only 1–2% of venture capital funding globally.

“Three things convinced us: a huge market that VC has typically ignored, an innovative product that demonstrably improves user experience and outcomes, and a strong founder in Zoe who’s driven and won’t take no for an answer. Those don’t often come together.” says Tom Shepherd, Senior Associate, SyndicateRoom.

Pilot programmes will commence soon to gather data on performance, health economics and usability across care home, hospital, and domiciliary settings. Published white papers will follow.

“Faecal incontinence is subjective and chronically underreported – we’ve never truly understood the scale of the problem because people are too ashamed to tell us. The clinical gap is real, and it has consequences. What Joyvié is building helps address the unmet clinical need and provides a useful adjunct in managing this,” says Dr. Ashish Sinha BMBS BMedSci(Hons) MD FRCS, Colorectal Surgeon, St Mark’s National Bowel Hospital.

Today’s announcement is expected to fund a direct-to-consumer product launch later this year, clinical pilots across care home, hospital, and domiciliary settings, strategic partnerships, and their first hires.

The post Founded after personal loss, Joyvié Health raises €897k to rethink continence underwear appeared first on EU-Startups.

The round was led by Division Q, with participation from NewSchool.vc and Percival Participations. This announcement follows shortly after its initial greenhouse deployments, public launch, and its nomination as a Top 3 finalist for the GreenTech Innovation Awards 2026. The winner will be announced next week at GreenTech Amsterdam.

Olivier Begerem, co-founder and CEO of Sensie, mentioned on LinkedIn, “The past six weeks have been crazy. Starting our first greenhouse deployments, introducing Sensie to the world, joining the HortiHeroes ecosystem, and being selected as a Top 3 nominee for the GreenTech Innovation Awards 2026. It has been intense in the best possible way.

“This funding is about more than capital. It is about bringing the right people around the table as we move from our first installations toward a system growers can rely on every single day. It gives us the support to keep building, testing, and improving alongside growers, researchers, and technology partners.” 

Founded in 2025 by Begerem and Christophe Sysmans (CTO), Sensie aims to democratise plant intelligence. It helps professional growers move beyond climate and substrate data by measuring how the plant itself responds in real time.

The company develops a wireless plant health wearable for professional growers. It states that while growers already measure many aspects of the crop, such as climate, irrigation and substrate data, Sensie makes the plant’s own response measurable in real time. Its wireless plant sensors capture direct physiological signals such as growth, water status, stress and recovery, then translate them into clear insights for better irrigation, climate and cultivation decisions. 

Its first product, Sensie Omni, combines direct plant feedback with root-zone and climate context. It captures the critical interaction between Supply (root zone), Demand (micro-climate) and Response (plant stress) in a single wireless device. The goal is to help growers better understand how their crop responds to decisions such as irrigation, ventilation, screening and climate strategy.

“Modern greenhouse horticulture is already highly data-driven. Yet one critical voice has largely been missing from the conversation: the plant itself. Sensie is changing that with affordable, wireless plant sensors that combine climate, irrigation, and substrate data with direct physiological feedback from the crop. The result is a powerful step toward truly plant-driven cultivation, helping growers make better decisions based on what their plants are actually experiencing,” NewSchool.vc mentioned on LinkedIn. 

With this funding, the company plans to further optimise its hardware and software and accelerate the commercial rollout. It aims to scale Sensie, expand real greenhouse deployments and further develop its platform. The startup is actively seeking certified distributors, technology partners, and research collaborators.

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The company has received support from its historical shareholders, notably Creadev, QIA, Temasek, FFC, ABC Impact, and ADM, as well as its banking partners. It has also announced the completion of its industrialisation phase and a reorganisation of its activities around the Nesle site, now focused on the commercial development of its product ranges. 

Clément Ray, CEO and cofounder of Innovafeed, said, “Since day one, we have carried a dual ambition: to demonstrate that we can produce high-performing, competitive, and sustainable ingredients for nutrition without relying on the intensive exploitation of marine resources; and that it is possible to build an innovative industrial project in France. 

“The successful scale-up of our industrial model marks a major milestone for Innovafeed today and opens up a new phase of commercial deployment. Innovafeed is now focusing its efforts on accelerating the development of value chains for its ingredients, capturing the full value of their multiple functional properties improving animal health and growth, which have been validated and proven for ten years now.”

Founded in 2016 by Aude Guo, Bastien Oggeri, and Clément Ray, Innovafeed develops a technology to rear and transform the Hermetia illucens fly (Black soldier fly) for animal and plant nutrition, thus offering alternatives to the fishmeal and vegetable oils used in fish and animal feed.

The company states that its unique technology makes it possible to reproduce the natural cycle of the insect on a large scale under controlled and optimised conditions. It uses 3,000 sensors to optimise at any time the breeding conditions of larvae. It also uses AI to limit human intervention in the breeding process: robots automatically collect and count the 20,000 eggs laid every second. Innovafeed thus intends to put the insect back at the heart of the food chain.

Innovafeed has also created a proprietary industrial process that transforms larvae using a wet method, ensuring high product quality, especially in digestibility.

The company’s last funding round was in 2022, where it raised €250 million in a Series D financing round led by Qatar Investment Authority (QIA). Since then, the company has achieved three major milestones: its Nesle production unit is now fully operational. In three years, it has produced over 15,000 tons of protein and oil; production volumes have increased tenfold, while production costs have been divided by seven. 

It also witnessed strong commercial traction: revenues have doubled each year, driven by structured partnerships with clients. Lastly, it claims to have demonstrated environmental impact because of the circularity of its industrial symbiosis model; its products deliver a 70–90% reduction in carbon emissions compared with conventional products.

The company states that following a phase of R&D and industrial development that achieved key operational maturity milestones, it is entering a new stage of growth. In this context, it is initiating a reorganisation of its activities, specifically the reduction of zootechnical R&D activities and their integration from its historical Gouzeaucourt site into the Nesle facility. A project to reduce 60 positions is planned, two-thirds of which will affect the Gouzeaucourt site.

“Over the past five years, Innovafeed has won its industrial bet and developed a world-unique asset: a fully operational large-scale production facility that enables highly optimised production of ingredients with functional properties that are valued by pet food and aquaculture players,” said Bénédicte Monpert, Food Managing Director at Creadev. 

In its new phase of development, the company will redirect its investments towards commercial deployment and operational excellence. The new financing operation will specifically enable Innovafeed to accelerate the commercial development of the Hilucia ranges, particularly in the functional segments of aquaculture and pet food, to invest in industrial equipment and processes to develop new offerings and applications, and to optimise the industrial asset base to increase the performance and capacity of the production lines.

“We must also adapt our organisation to this new phase by reducing industrial and zootechnical R&D activities, while continuing to invest alongside our customers to demonstrate functionalities and performance of our products. The talents who made up our R&D and industrial teams enabled us to reach unprecedented milestones in the sector. While we must take demanding measures to adjust our organisation to this new phase, we are deeply committed to recognising the dedication of our teams over the past years and to implementing this transformation plan responsibly, in full respect of social dialogue and in close connection with local authorities,” Ray added.

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