COLIPI lands $1.94M in seed funding for bio-based oils

In Germany, COLIPI recently received €1.8 million seed funding for further development of CO2-Neutral Climate OilTM, led by venture capital firm HTGF along with Innovationsstarter Fonds Hamburg, Nidobirds, and business angel Stefan De Loecker. Grants totaling €4.3 million complement the funding that will be used to enter the market with Climate Oil and scale precision fermentation processes to 10 cubic meters at the pilot scale.

The start-up founded in 2022, a spin-off from the Technical University of Hamburg, supported by the EXIST Research Transfer Program (German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action) and the InnoRampUp Program (IFB Innovationsstarter GmbH), is revolutionizing the way oil is produced.

COLIPI is, in a sense, a brewery for oils. Carbon is sourced or filtered from the air rather than pumped from the ground. CO2-containing industrial emissions and organic by-products, for example, from the agricultural industry, are converted by microorganisms through fermentations into valuable biomaterials like Climate Oil. The oil is more sustainable than crude oil and palm oil, considering the CO2 footprint and its impact on biodiversity. It is enabled by a patented bioprocess, a combination of a specially designed gas fermentation bioreactor and the world’s fastest CO2-consuming bacteria.