Vinted-backer invests in startup turning seaweed into plastic: 'Replaces fossil fuels'

Burda Principal Investments (BPI), the growth equity arm of the German billionaire-owned Hubert Burda Media group, has led a $13.6m investment in Australian seaweed-to-plastic startup Uluu.

BPI, which has the likes of Vinted and Nord Security in its portfolio, was joined in the round by Main Sequence, the family office of Novetex Textiles founder and billionaire Ronna Chao. The new funding round values the Uluu at over $100m.

Christian Teichmann, chief executive of Burda Principal Investments, said Uluu “redefines” how materials can be produced more sustainably at an industrial scale.

Uluu will use the fresh cash to build a demonstration plant for its plastic substitute, with the aim to boost production from just 100kg/year today to 10 tonnes a year.

Boiling seaweed

Uluu was founded in 2020 by marine scientist Dr. Julia Reisser and Michael Kingsbury, a former M&A lawyer. The pair have developed a way to turn seaweed into a plastic alternative – minus the petrochemicals.

Uluu cooks seaweed to release its natural sugars, then feeds them to salt-loving microbes that turn the brew into a natural plastic inside fermenters – a bit like brewing beer, but for bioplastics. When the microbes are “fat” enough, Uluu bursts them open, extracts the material, and melts it into biodegradable pellets that work with existing plastic-making machines.

It has already supplied small samples of its plastic replacement to Quiksilver, sleepwear brand Papinelle and Audi.

"After four years' work developing this technology, including two years' running our pilot plant, we're excited to take this next step and start delivering meaningful volumes of our materials to customers," said Kingsbury.

"The demonstration plant is a critical step in showing Uluu can scale to truly compete with and replace fossil plastics," he said.

Seaweed struggles

Despite seaweed’s potential as a bio-based alternative to everything from chemicals and cosmetics to plastics, it has struggled to scale largely due to the fact that it carries a hefty green premium compared to the fossil-fuelled status quo.

Anthony Bellafiore, investment manager at Norway-based VC Katapult Ocean, believes that the price of bioplastics will need to drop dramatically in order to scale.

“They need to be at parity or close to parity with traditional fossil-based plastics in order for them to be adopted at scale,” he recently told The Fish Site.