International. Kelpi raises more than £3 million in fundraising to advance its pioneering technology of creating biomaterial coatings from seaweed.
The funding round will bring sustainable packaging for the food and beverage and cosmetics sectors one step closer to supermarket shelves.
According to the company, Kelpi's unique coatings will allow recyclable and compostable packaging at home or industrially to replace single-use fossil fuel plastics that take hundreds of years to break down.
Kelpi says it will use the funds to conduct manufacturing pilots for its proprietary coatings for paper and cardboard.
"This historic investment allows Kelpi to scale up our pioneering work using seaweed to create bioplastic packaging with the barrier properties required by customers," said Kelpi CEO and co-founder Neil Morris.
"Kelpi can now play a key role in eliminating plastic pollution and ending our reliance on fossil fuels to create single-use packaging," Morris said.
"We are thrilled to receive this backing from deep science and sustainability investors such as Science Creates Ventures and Green Angel Syndicate to enable us to accelerate our pioneering work with leading food and beverage companies around the world to test our materials at scale."
Algae provide a particularly valuable source of carbohydrates for biomaterials. It grows prolifically without the need for fertilizer, soil or fresh water, offering benefits over alternative plants from which bioplastics can be made. It absorbs carbon as it grows, deacidifying and reoxygenating the ocean.
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