Ghent-based Zymofix has announced a €6m flagship production plant in Deinze, backed by a Series A round led by First Imagine!, as it moves from early-stage production into industrial manufacturing.

Microbial products are gaining traction as agriculture looks for more sustainable alternatives, but many struggle to reach farms at scale because the microorganisms inside them are hard to produce cost-effectively.

Zymofix’s Zyft platform tackles this by growing bacteria, fungi and yeasts on solid substrates made from biomass residues, rather than in liquid tanks.

Demand has already outpaced supply. The company’s 15+ customers, predominantly multinational agricultural-input companies, have outgrown its existing production capacity.

The Deinze site will produce 300 tonnes a year from Q4 2027, enough to treat approximately 1 million hectares. A planned €25m expansion in 2028, subject to commissioning, would raise capacity to 2,000 tonnes, or approximately 10 million hectares.

Emile Redant, co-founder and CEO of Zymofix, noted that finding a promising microorganism is only part of the challenge.

“The harder part is manufacturing it consistently, efficiently and at the volumes the market requires,” he said. “Solid-state fermentation has significant potential, but historically it has been difficult to scale.”

Zymofix has spent the past four years developing Zyft to fix that problem.

“Having successfully validated the platform at pilot scale, the new facility in Deinze allows us to take the next step into industrial production,” said of why industrial-scale production matters now.

For food and drink manufacturers, the platform’s use of biomass residues as growth substrates points to a wider conversation about putting side streams to work in fermentation-based processes.