Probiotics lands US$6.2M funding to cut antibiotics out of food supply chain

Probiotics, an antimicrobial peptide technology startup in Singapore, has raised US$6.2 million in a Series A financing round.

Hatch’s Blue Revolution Fund led the round with participation from Seventure Partners, SEEDS Capital, The Yield Lab Asia Pacific, GrainCorp Ventures, Farmabase, Trendlines Agrifood Fund, Ponderosa VC, and others.

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“In 2023, we took our technology out of the lab and turned it into a real manufacturing process. In 2024, the Series A gives us the working capital to produce larger commercial volumes so that we can solve the industry’s disease challenges and cut antibiotics out of the food supply chain,” Probiotics co-founder and CEO Jonathan Bester said.

Peptobiotics is a startup engaged in researching and producing recombinant antimicrobial peptides, using novel biotechnology to reduce the manufacturing costs of antimicrobial peptides.

Its first product targets the aquaculture industry, renowned for its antibiotic abuse, where bacterial infections cost shrimp farmers billions in yearly losses.

“Antibiotic use in agriculture remains a huge challenge for the industry because many of the so-called alternative products make big performance claims but cannot measure up to the efficacy of antibiotics when applied in the farm environment. Our focus at Peptobiotics is to use biotech to create a real agricultural antibiotic alternative that is effective for farmers, clean for nature, humane for animals, and safe for consumers,” the CEO added.

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“Our breakthrough was screening through the 1000s of peptides to find the ones that could have real efficacy in agriculture, then figuring out the biotechnology innovations needed to produce them on an industrial scale at a price point acceptable to our customers,” commented Koh Jhee Hong, co-founder and CTO of Peptobiotics:

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