French carbon-negative rubber startup baCta completes fund raising round

Paris – baCta, a French startup specialising in ‘carbon-negative’ natural rubber production, has raised €3.3 million in pre-seed funding.

In an 11 Oct social media announcement, founder and CEO Mathieu Nohet said the round was led by OVNI Capital, and with participation from Kima Ventures, Sharpstone Capital, another.vc, and other prominent individual business persons.

Launched in January, baCta produces carbon-negative natural rubber using engineered micro-organisms and renewable feedstocks.

According to its website, the process uses a 'mixotrophic approach' — meaning the organisms can use multiple sources of energy and carbon, instead of relying on just one — capturing CO2 and other renewable carbon inside the bacteria.

During fermentation, AI-designed enzymes and optimised pathways transform the carbon into isoprene.

baCta then uses “a powerful synthetic organelles technology” developed at the French health institute Inserm to polymerise the isoprene, which is later purified into "high-quality, carbon-negative rubber."

The French start-up said it employs “the latest advances in AI and lab automation”  during the process for protein modelling and to collect data for the development of organisms and bioreactors.

“With this funding, we’re expanding our team of top-tier scientists… and scaling up our production capabilities,” said Nohet in his post.

The next milestone, he said, is to engineer “a microbial strain capable of producing high-quality natural rubber at a pilot scale, paving the way for a pre-industrial demonstrator.”

Nohet went on to add that the company is using rubber as a starting point to develop a 'full platform,' where microbes will act as 'programmable molecular factories' to create carbon-negative isoprenoids.

The platform is then intended to support a variety of segments within the petro-chemical industry worldwide.