Ÿnsect declared bankrupt, seeks buyer for insect farming business: 'Want to continue our mission'

A French court ruled this week that Ÿnsect be placed in judicial liquidation. In plain English, the company is bankrupt. And now it's looking for a buyer for its insect farming tech – calling for “the acquisition of assets to continue its mission,” according to a statement.

Founded in 2011, the Ÿnsect raised over $600 m from investors including Astanor Ventures, BPI France and the European Institute of Technology (EIT) to grow mealworms (a type of insect larva) and turn them into animal feed, pet food, and fertiliser.

What happened?

In February, Ÿnsect entered insolvency proceedings after it failed to secure enough financing to continue. In April, Ÿnsect’s co-founder Antoine Hubert acquired the company’s pilot facility near Dole, France via his new venture Keprea, but that wasn’t enough to keep Ÿnsect afloat.

“[We have been] unable to secure the necessary financing for its continuation plan within the required timeframe,” the company said in a statement.

Ÿnsect will close its main factory, but the Keprea plant will remain operational for now.

“We hope that the significant technical and industrial skills developed by the teams at Ÿnsect, along with the established business relationships, will find productive use and contribute significantly to both Europe’s protein independence and the fight against climate change,” it added.

Boom to bust

Ÿnsect rode a wave of investor optimism that insects could tackle some of the toughest sustainability challenges in food and agriculture, such as the need for alternative proteins to meat. That optimism has largely faded, as startups struggled to bring down the costs of the protein source for animal feed and failed to win over human consumers.

On the commercial side, Ÿnsect is also widely understood to have attempted to scale too quickly. "Everything was done too big, too fast, all at once," Hadrien Godard, a former employee who was affected by the sweeping job cuts at the startup, told the AFP.

Ÿnsect might be the most high-profile loss for the industry, but it’s far from the only one that’s faced troubles. Agronutris, another French insect-rearing startup, filed for court protection in 2025 amid financial difficulties. Earlier this year, Danish startup Enorm was declared bankrupt after failing to raise enough money to continue.

The largest remaining player is Paris-based InnovaFeed, which also raises insects for animal and plant feed. The company has raised over $450 m to date and operates three production facilities, two in France and one in the US. However, in October it announced it was closing its US plant as part of what the company called a “phased, de-risking approach.”