MAASH secures €12.15M in financing to take mycoprotein production to industrial scale

MAASH (Brussels) has secured €12.15 million in a financing package to move its mycoprotein ingredient business to demonstration-scale production. The package combines €5.85 million in private equity from five investors — Ambra Capital, InvestPro, Bpifrance Amorçage Industriel, Nordzucker (German sugar group), and Tereos (French sugar and starch group) — with €4.3 million from Bpifrance's Première Usine / France 2030 grant programme and a €2 million Bpifrance Prêt d'Amorçage Investissement loan. Co-founders Frédéric Van Gansberghe and Gaspard Gilbert are joined in September by incoming CEO Samah Garringer, who brings 25-plus years of food-ingredient and industrial scale-up experience from DSM, Avril Group, and ENOUGH Foods.

Founded in 2021, MAASH produces LoCylia™, a fermentation-derived mycoprotein (fungal protein) ingredient. The production process uses controlled fermentation — temperature, pH, and oxygen parameters — to yield a high-protein ingredient that food manufacturers can use to reduce the meat content of existing products by 10–30% or to develop vegan and vegetarian alternatives without reformulating the broader recipe. The company's 12m³ demonstration plant is located at a former Metabolic Explorer site in Carling-Saint-Avold, northeastern France.

A financing structure designed around French industrial policy

The package is not a conventional venture equity round. The Bpifrance Première Usine grant and the associated loan are tied to the French production site, not the Belgian HQ, and reflect France's sustained industrial policy commitment under the France 2030 programme to build alternative-protein production capacity domestically. Bpifrance Amorçage Industriel participates as a direct equity investor alongside four private investors, making the public-finance and equity components structurally separate but coordinated.

The private equity investors include two food-industry strategics. Nordzucker and Tereos are among Europe's largest sugar and starch processing groups — incumbents in industrial fermentation supply chains who understand the relationship between fermentation parameters, yield, and industrial cost. Their equity participation is a form of commercial validation: both have the technical knowledge to assess whether MAASH's production process is industrially credible, and both are writing cheques rather than letters of intent.

The scale-up test

The capital finances the launch of the 12m³ demonstration plant and the preparation of the business case for 10,000 tons per year of annual industrial production — a roughly 800x scale increase from demonstration to commercial volumes. Van Gansberghe described the two years since acquiring the Carling-Saint-Avold site as turning "an industrial base into a credible and executable project"; Garringer's appointment as CEO signals that execution of the scale-up plan is now the primary task.

The incoming CEO's background — DSM, Avril, ENOUGH Foods — maps directly to the challenge: industrial biotech scale-up in regulated food-ingredient markets, where regulatory approval timelines, customer qualification processes, and capital cost curves all compress the runway between proof-of-concept and commercial revenue. The capital from private and public sources combined gives MAASH roughly 18 months to demonstrate that the demo plant produces LoCylia™ at a cost and quality that justifies the full industrial investment.