The Protein Brewery adds €18 million to scale mycoprotein production

The Protein Brewery added €18 million to its Series B and is steering the money toward active nutrition, functional foods and beverages, and longevity research for Fermotein, its mycoprotein ingredient. The round was led by ABN AMRO Sustainable Impact Fund and joined by Invest-NL, Novo Holdings, Madeli and the Brabant Development Agency, or BOM.

The new capital is earmarked to expand production at the Mijkenbroek facility to more than 2,000 metric tons and to push European sales after summer 2026. The first commercial focus in Europe will be ready-to-mix powders and bars. The same financing will support clinical and scientific work on the longevity-promoting properties of Fermotein and fund regulatory efforts in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India.

The European Commission authorized Fermotein under the EU Novel Food Regulation on June 17, after a positive vote from the Standing Committee on Plants, Animals, Food and Feed on May 13 and a favorable EFSA opinion published on December 1, 2025. The Protein Brewery can supply 600 metric tons of Fermotein in 2027, with production capacity rising to more than 2,000 tons by 2029.

The FDA advised The Protein Brewery to withdraw its GRAS notice because of deficiencies in the submission, including issues with animal-study design, exposure data, compositional safety assessment, bioinformatics and organism-specific secondary metabolite characterization. The company self-affirmed GRAS in March 2024, filed a GRAS notice in March 2025 and withdrew it in February 2026, but chief executive Thijs Bosch does not see the setback derailing U.S. plans.

Founded in January 2020 as a demerger of BioscienZ, The Protein Brewery opened a pilot plant in Breda in June 2021, started work on a demonstration plant in January 2022 and says scaled production has been underway since 2023. McKinsey data puts the share of consumers who rank healthy aging as a top or very important priority at up to 60 percent.