March 25, 2024

Photo credit: Cauldron

By Lynda Kiernan-Stone, Global AgInvesting Media

Located in New South Wales, Cauldron was created to unlock the potential of precision fermentation. And as it continues on its growth trajectory, has closed on a A$9.5 million Series A led by Horizons Ventures, with participation from SOSV, In-Q-Tel, and existing investor Main Sequence. 

Precision fermentation has the potential to revolutionize food production and distribution systems via increased food production without the need to expand agricultural land, reduced environmental impact, nutritional enhancement, and year-round, consistent supply – offering a wide array of sustainable solutions to address food insecurity on a global scale. However, to address issues at scale, the solutions must be able to economically scale as well. 

With a foundation of more than 35 years of R&D, Cauldron is a global precision fermentation manufacturer with proprietary hyper-fermentation technology for application across food, feed, fiber, and fuel production that offers attractive economics and price parity at commercial scale for bio-based production of mainstream products.

The company’s continuous fermentation, or “hyper-fermentation”, deploys a novel bioreactor design and proprietary growth medium formulation that improves the economic premise of large-scale fermentation production by five times compared to current industry standards. 

“Cauldron has proven its precision fermentation at an industrially relevant scale, unlocking a significant decrease — between 30 and 50 percent — in the cost of goods for our customers vs. traditional batch fermentation,” said Michelle Stansfield, CEO and co-founder, Cauldron.

“From biofuels and agriculture to cosmetics and chemicals, the opportunities are immense, and with the support of our incredible investors, we’re poised to capitalize on them.”  

Stansfield helped develop Cauldron’s technology as the general manager of Agritechnology, which spent 35 years researching and developing continuous fermentation systems for the agricultural market in Australia. Cauldron then acquired Agritechnology’s precision fermentation IP through its seed round in 2023 with the intent to commercialize and scale the technology on a global scale. 

What sets Cauldron apart is the ability of its technology to run continuous hyper-fermentation production compared to short-term “batch” production widely used today. The company has successfully run a 10,000-liter production system continuously for more than eight months without contamination or “genetic drift” of the microbes – two of the biggest challenges in running this type of long-term system. This ability enables the company to outproduce traditional batch systems five times larger with smaller and far less costly bioreactors. 

“Precision fermentation is an amazing technology, because it enables bio-based production of a wide range of products with diverse applications,” said Chis Liu, Horizons Ventures. 

“To-date, the technology has been hamstrung by its costs compared to conventional production methods, but Cauldron’s unique solution significantly improves the competitiveness of precision fermentation both in capital and operating expenditure.”  

This Series A brings Cauldron’s total funding to-date to A$20 million, and will be used by the company to keep pace with its faster-than-expected customer growth, build robust proof cases for the application of its technology, and finalize partners and plans for a 500,000-liter facility. 

In the meantime, the company explained that it is already working with global commercial, multi-sector partners at its existing 25,000-liter facility in Orange, New South Wales, working toward its long-term plan of building plants around the world to deliver hyper-fermentation for the production of bio-based products for its partners. 

Olivia Jones, director, IQT, stated that this ability is part of what attracted them to this investment, saying, “Food insecurity and competition among countries to control resources is a real risk. The technology Cauldron has created in enabling alternative ways of producing food, proteins, and materials on an industrial scale will be game changing.”

~ Lynda Kiernan-Stone is editor in chief with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, as well as HighQuest Group’s Unconventional Ag. She can be reached at lkiernan-stone@globalaginvesting.com.

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