Visibuilt raises €3.34M Seed to grow roads from fungi, not petroleum

Visibuilt, a Danish biotech company founded in 2022 by Line Kloster Pedersen (CEO) and Oleksii Rebrov, has raised €3.34 million (DKK 25 million) in a Seed round co-led by EIFO and Unconventional Ventures, with Proptechfonden joining as a new investor and EMDFonden following on. The capital goes to testing and validation at larger scale, production setup for commercial-scale trials, and team growth.

Roads paved with fungi

The company's product, visiBINDER, is a binder grown from mycelium — the root-network structure of fungi — designed to replace the petroleum-derived bitumen that binds aggregate into asphalt and holds together road surfaces, pavements, and infrastructure paving systems.

Bitumen is not an obscure input. It is a direct refinery product derived from crude oil, used in enormous quantities across road construction and maintenance. The European road network is maintained and rebuilt continuously; every tonne of new asphalt incorporates a bitumen fraction that carries the embedded carbon of its oil origin. Replacing that binder with a biologically-grown equivalent is the market Visibuilt is targeting.

"Closing this Seed round is an important milestone for Visibuilt," Pedersen said. "It enables us to mature our technical platform, validate our solution at a larger scale, and take the next steps towards the market."

Mycelium materials have been commercialised in adjacent applications. Ecovative, the American pioneer, built a market in packaging foam and leather alternatives — both relatively low-mechanical-demand contexts. Paving is different: a road surface must withstand compression from vehicle loads, thermal expansion and contraction across seasons, and repeated freeze-thaw stress. The Seed round's primary function is to find out whether visiBINDER can do that.

The Unconventional thesis

Thea Messel, General Partner at Unconventional Ventures, made a specific claim about the business model alongside the environmental case: "Every tonne of visiBINDER placed in a paving application displaces a tonne of fossil binder, generates royalty revenue, and reduces the embedded carbon of the infrastructure it goes into."

The royalty-revenue structure is notable. If Visibuilt licences the material rather than manufacturing it at scale, the business model is capital-light and IP-defensible — but requires getting the formulation into the hands of road-construction firms, who are deeply conservative technology adopters with long procurement cycles and strict material-approval processes.

EIFO's Sara Sande put the market case plainly: "Concrete and asphalt production are among the largest sources of CO₂ emissions globally. If we are to truly reduce emissions, it requires new solutions in heavy industries." The investor mix — EIFO (green industry focus), EMDFonden (Danish materials transition), Proptechfonden, and Unconventional Ventures — reads as a deliberate coalition bet that sustainable construction materials are the next materials-transition wave after energy storage and packaging.

The 18-month test

The immediate task is performance validation: demonstrating that visiBINDER holds up under real paving conditions and temperatures at sufficient scale and consistency to be commercially credible. No single infrastructure tender is won quickly; road-maintenance agencies and construction firms require proof over multiple seasons before specifying a new binding material.

If the performance case is made, Visibuilt faces the market-access challenge: who decides what goes into a road surface, and how do you reach them? Public infrastructure procurement is typically managed through tenders and approved-material lists. The company's path to market depends on getting visiBINDER onto those lists — a process that takes longer than 18 months even with a successful product. The Seed runway is buying time to begin it.