Volare raises €7.1M to ramp Finland's first industrial insect protein factory

Volare (Pori) has raised €7.1 million in a round led by Springvest, with participation from Maki.vc alongside existing and new investors. The Finnish startup — spun out of the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland in 2021 by Jarna Hyvönen (CEO), Tuure Parviainen (CSO), and Matti Tähtinen (CTO) — paired the announcement with the inauguration of Volare 01, its 10,000 m² industrial facility in Pori. The plant cost €15 million to build, financed across previous rounds; the €7.1M now funds the ramp phase.

What the plant does

Volare's process starts with food-industry side streams — by-products from food manufacturing that arrive at the factory as waste. Black Soldier Fly (Hermetia illucens) larvae are the conversion engine: fed those inputs, they produce three saleable outputs. Insect protein — targeted at 5,000 tonnes per year at full capacity — targets aquafeed, pet food, and poultry feed markets, competing directly with fishmeal and soy protein. Insect oil is extracted as a fat supplement. Frass, the larval excreta, exits as an organic nitrogen fertiliser.

The economic premise is waste-in / premium-protein-out: side streams arrive at low or negative cost, and BSF larvae perform the conversion without the energy-intensive processing that marine or soy protein sources require. This has been proven at pilot scale across Europe and Southeast Asia. The question Volare 01 is designed to answer is whether those economics hold at the 5,000-tonne mark — a scale that has, until now, been more projection than established result.

From one plant to five times the capacity

The round is explicitly tied to two parallel tracks: completing the Pori ramp-up and beginning preparation for a second European facility described as approximately five times Volare 01's capacity — implying roughly 25,000 tonnes per year. That step-change would require capital an order of magnitude beyond €7.1M; the current round is more usefully read as a validation bridge than a scaling warchest.

"Volare 01 proves that our technology and production model work at industrial scale," said Jarna Hyvönen. "We delivered the factory on schedule and on budget, demonstrating our ability to build production capacity cost-effectively and laying a strong foundation for further growth."

The on-schedule, on-budget claim carries weight because European insect protein's credibility gap stems partly from a history of pilot cost overruns and delayed timelines. If Pori's per-tonne figures match pre-construction projections at operating capacity, Volare becomes one of the first European BSF operators to move from modelled economics to verified factory economics — the data point the sector's next-round funders have been waiting for.