Beta Hatch one step closer to sustainable insect feed for poultry

The company plans to break ground on the largest mealworm facility for animal feed in North America.
calendar icon 24 May 2020
clock icon 4 minute read

Beta Hatch, a company industrialising the production of insects as a sustainable protein for animal feed, today announced the close of their Series A1 funding. Co-led by Cavallo Ventures, Wilbur-Ellis’ venture capital arm, and early-stage venture firm Innova Memphis, the round also included investments from Klein Private Equity Investment and Brighton Jones Investment Partners.

Beta Hatch develops insect-rearing technology that converts organic waste directly into high-value proteins, oils and nutrients for poultry and aquaculture, enabling insects to cost-effectively meet the global scale of demand for plant and animal nutrients.

“Insects have the potential to be the world’s most sustainable protein,” said Virginia Emery, Founder and CEO, Beta Hatch. “This new funding allows us to break ground on the construction of our sustainable flagship facility, so that we can scale up production commercially to meet existing demand of thousands of tons, and to continue our technology development to further bring down costs and increase efficiencies.”

The new flagship facility in Cashmere, Washington, will be the largest mealworm production facility for animal feed in North America, with the capacity to produce a tonne of insect protein per day. Scheduled to be operational in early 2021, the facility will be partially powered by waste heat from a neighbouring data centre to reduce electrical needs.

“Whether for aquaculture, poultry or even for use in the domestic pet marketplace, we clearly see the opportunity posed by Beta Hatch in addressing the need for more sustainable sources of feed protein,” said Dean Didato, Partner, Innova Memphis. “The Beta Hatch team has engineered several innovative solutions to increase insect growth and mechanical processing efficiencies that provide a competitive edge in the space. In addition, with consumer desires to know more about the origin of one’s food and its rearing, harvesting and processing, Innova fully believes that these trends will drive further market adoption of insect protein.”

Beyond the funding, Beta Hatch’s contributions to the scientific community continue to grow as the Company recently completed the first published assembly of the yellow mealworm genome. The genome will be published as part of an open source article in the Journal of Insects as Food and Feed in Summer 2020 and will serve as an important resource for the scientific community in furthering research on the mealworm and other commercially relevant insect species.

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