Paris-based baCta, an industrial biotech
startup developing an AI-powered bioproduction platform for industrial
ingredients, has closed a €7 million seed funding round led by LocalGlobe and
Daphni, with participation from OVNI Capital and several business angels,
including founders of Phagos, Genomines and Mistral AI.
Read our earlier interview
with Mathieu Nohet, CEO and co-founder of baCta.
Demand for industrial ingredients is rising,
but current production methods, such as extraction from limited natural sources
or petrochemical synthesis, remain costly, seasonal and exposed to geopolitical
and climate risks. While bioproduction offers an alternative, developing
high-yield industrial strains has traditionally been a slow and expensive
trial-and-error process.
Founded by Mathieu Nohet and Marie Rouquette,
baCta aims to address this challenge by enabling more sustainable production of
high-value molecules. The company uses AI and precision fermentation to program
microorganisms as molecular factories for industrial ingredient manufacturing.
Its baCtaForge platform combines advances in
synthetic biology, robotics and generative AI to explore genomic regions,
long-range interactions and regulatory pathways often overlooked by
conventional engineering. The platform applies bio-based reinforcement learning
to reduce development time and costs.
Commenting on the development, Mathieu Nohet, founder and CEO of baCta, said the industry is entering a phase in which microorganisms can serve as programmable molecular factories capable of producing organic molecules at a commercial scale.
The new funding will be used to scale up
production by validating industrial processes at pilot and commercial stages,
leveraging a strategic partnership with a French industrial player to access
production capacity, and initiating commercialisation. The company also plans
to expand baCtaForge’s capabilities to additional high-value ingredients.