By Editor, Global AgInvesting Media

Spanish foodtech startup MOA Foodtech has raised €3.3 million ($3.8 million) in a new funding round to scale its artificial intelligence-powered biomass fermentation platform. The investment, backed by the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund, Swanlaab Innvierte Agri Food Tech, and CDTI-Innvierte, will enable the company to expand its fermentation capacity and accelerate the commercial rollout of its sustainable ingredient portfolio.

Founded in late 2020 by CEO Bosco Emparanza, CSO Susana Sánchez, PhD, and CFO José María Elorza, MOA Foodtech utilizes non-GMO yeast strains to convert agricultural and food industry side streams into functional ingredients for human food and animal nutrition.

The capital injection will support scaling production from 120,000-liter to 225,000-liter bioreactors, driving higher volume for MOA’s initial ingredient line:

• MOA Q5: A versatile egg replacer and emulsifier targeted at bakery products and sauces.
• MOA Yeast: An ingredient formulated to improve taste, texture, and nutritional profiles across consumer food applications.
• MOA Yeast FeG: A specialized variant developed for pet food and livestock nutrition.

The startup currently produces its proprietary ingredients through a contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) partner in Spain, selling directly to manufacturers via an internal sales force. MOA Yeast FeG has already reached commercial application in a market-available pet food, while validation trials for MOA Q5 and MOA Yeast remain active across European food manufacturers.

In addition to its proprietary lineup, MOA collaborates directly with agricultural producers producing over 100,000 tons of annual side streams—such as distillers’ grains and crop residues—to upcycle their waste into market-ready inputs.

“We also run co-development projects with companies looking to transform their side streams into new functional ingredients, and we already have customers in this business line,” Emparanza told AgFunderNews. “The production and commercial model is defined case by case and may involve external manufacturers, partner facilities or licensing. It does not necessarily require building a fermentation facility on the partner’s site.”

A primary technological driver behind MOA’s process is its proprietary AI engine, known as Albatross. Using agrifood byproducts as growth media introduces chemical variability, requiring real-time optimization. Albatross addresses this by analyzing byproduct compositions alongside metabolic models drawn from MOA’s internal library of over 300 microbial strains.

“We believe that sustainability is not enough,” Emparanza said in the AgFunderNews report. “We have to achieve lower costs in the culture media. Our AI tool Albatross combines the byproducts with microbes to give us the most efficient fermentation process that we need to achieve a specific biomass.”

The proprietary platform has substantially reduced product development timelines from months to days. First, the team sequences the genomes of its microbes and builds specific metabolic models of the microbes that are already in the database. Then, as Emparanza explained, MOA takes the data from the lab and the byproducts that they use to start working with Albatross.

“As an example,” he told AFN, “for our first ingredient, it took us six months to develop from the experimental design to the best conditions in the lab. Right now with Albatross, we are able to complete the same process in less than two weeks.”

By substituting traditional carbon sources like dextrose with low-cost agrifood side streams, MOA Foodtech aims to establish a cost-effective, scalable foundation for the broader biomass fermentation industry.

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