Swiss-Italian startup Ferm Labs secures €3 million to scale its bioprocessing-based B2B ingredient platform

Ferm Labs, a Zug-based ingredient startup specialising in proprietary, high-yield bioprocessing platforms, has secured €3 million to scale its bioprocessing platform across the global clean-label ingredient market. 

The round was led by CDP Venture Capital (through its Green Transition Fund/NextGenerationEU), alongside a syndicate of European investors including Fund F, Redstone (in collaboration with Euregio+ and Alpine VC), and food industry leader Loacker.

“Ferm Labs has built an extraordinary DeepTech platform that redefines efficiency, sustainability, and flavour performance. We are thrilled to lead this round and support Stephanie, Mattia, and the team as they scale manufacturing and drive European expansion,” said Enrico Filì, Head of Green Transition Fund at CDP Venture Capital. 

Founded in 2025 by serial entrepreneurs Stephanie Lüpold (CEO) and Mattia Baroni (CTO), Ferm Labs is building a new category of B2B flavour systems for the food industry. The company states that it develops high-performance, clean-label ingredients that replicate full sensory profiles while improving cost efficiency and naturalness.

According to the company, industrial food production has long faced the compromise between cheap synthetic additives and slow, costly natural ingredients. Ferm Labs claims to eliminate this trade-off.

By guiding non-GMO microbes through custom parameters, Ferm Labs highlights that its platform accelerates fermentation from weeks to hours. The high-yield system upcycles low-value sidestreams into potent kokumi peptide profiles, delivering stable, clean-label flavour pastes and powders free of E-numbers, added fats, or high sodium content.

The startup’s flagship flavour builder, Kokumesan, targets the US/European industrial cheese market, which, according to the company, is worth €68 billion. It is upcycled from liquid whey, and it reportedly delivers an authentic aged-cheese profile. 

“The era of flavour trade-offs is officially over. Kokumesan proves what our platform can do in cheese flavouring, but it is just our launchpad. We are building a category-defining B2B ingredient engine – powering the next era of natural food by uniting deep-tech bioprocessing with uncompromising taste at global scale,” said Lüpold. 

The Swiss-Italian startup notes that Kokumesan provides 75% Cost-in-Use savings for manufacturers by reducing the inclusion of expensive raw cheese in formulations from 20% to under 1% without sensory degradation. 

Ferm Labs further notes that Kokumesan’s high processability is another key factor in its rapid adoption. It eliminates fat and sodium build-up, preventing machine clogging while extending shelf life.

“We essentially broke the math on industrial flavour kinetics. By accelerating fermentation speed and yield, we eliminated the cost penalty of natural ingredients while delivering a richer, cleaner profile at an unbeatable cost-in-use,” said Baroni. 

Headquartered in Zug, with its production engine in Bolzano, Ferm Labs plans to use this capital to expand bioprocessing capacity in South Tyrol, grow the European B2B sales force, and scale R&D headcount for new product categories.

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