As the global community faces the threat of global warming and climate change, startups are looking at the possible solutions to some of the most pressing challenges that come with it –from food scarcity to water conservation. In Malaysia, one startup builds its solutions based on something that is already part of the natural ecosystem: insects.

“Insect’s role in nature is to create cycles, breaking down organic materials and standing at the base of the food chain. We have been and continue to be excited by the potential that technology provides to harness this power of insects and leverage for a more sustainable food system,” explains Founder and CEO Leo Wein in an email to e27.

“After initial research and first production of flies, Protenga took the idea of growing black soldier flies from academic papers to commercial activities.”

The company’s journey began in 2016 with this vision of making insects “do the work” to create a regenerative food system that is in balance with nature. Protenga built its first pilot commercial farm in Johor Baru after raising its US$2 million seed funding round in 2020; it uses insect by-products from the farm to produce organic fertiliser and animal feed.

After achieving several key milestones, the company returned today with the closing of a US$2 million venture debt facility with a syndicate of Singapore-based investors. With this new funding in tow, Protenga is ready to develop its next-generation production facilities and introduce its pet food brand YumGrubs.

By expanding its smart insect farms, the company aims to make insect farming accessible and profitable. This new production facility will also provide co-manufacturing for third-party and white-label brands to accelerate insect-based pet food’s growth and transition into the pet food mainstream.

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“Accessing debt financing starts our journey of bringing insect farming from being predominantly equity-financed to a broader set of financing options such as infrastructure financing or conventional bank loans and decouples the expansion of our physical production facilities from our equity-based growth investments in our technology and commercialisation platform. We have also been extremely pleased with the very positive customer and market feedback on our pet food offerings, providing validation of our team’s intensive R&D work over the last year,” Wein comments on the funding round.

Saving the world with insects

When asked about how their smart farm works, and how exactly it differs from the rest, Wein begins his explanation by stating that Protenga technology captures 600,000 data points related to farm performance every day.

“Every grow-out cycle and every new facility … helps us better understand how to optimise production based on various feedstocks, micro-climates, SOPs, insect strains, etc. Like a giant parallelised experiment in search of optimal configurations which then can be quickly replicated across thousands of similar sites. By running many small(er) well-controlled experiments in quick succession or even in parallel, we learn and improve much faster than large-scale operators,” he says.

“The faster we can scale insect production, the faster we can transition the food system away from its dependency on the oil industry. With around a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions coming from the agriculture sector, the faster the transition happens, the better the world is at achieving its goals toward CO2 neutrality and limiting the impacts of climate change. We have a model which is capital efficient, allowing fast scaling,” he continues.

He further elaborated that feeding the world is a global challenge that requires massive scale for true commercial and impact success –and scaling the more sustainable solutions is where the efforts should be concentrated.

“Today, the annual global production of all insect protein is only about 10,000 metric tons, while fish meal alone is about five million tons (and soy is around 500 million tons). The world needs players optimised for scale and resilience which requires the right combination of business model, production system (tech and facility design), genetics, commercial product development and capital structure. We believe we built such technology,” he stresses.

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With the work that they (and the insects) are doing, Protenga believes that they will be able to tackle six out of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), particularly in the area of improving farming and industrial practices and eliminating hunger.

Users of Protenga products themselves are divided into the B2B (for animal feed and fertilisers) and B2C categories (for pet food). Currently available in Malaysia and Singapore, the company is looking forward to making its products available in other countries “soon”.

What is next for Protenga

The Protenga team consists of 30 individuals with various backgrounds and skillsets, breeding specialists (ensuring the best quality of black soldier flies are grown), farming operators (taking care of the larvae), engineering (designing innovative mechanical, electronics and sensors IoT systems) and corporate roles.

The company said that with its seed funding, it was able to build and launch three facilities, enabling Protenga to produce significant double-digit tonnage every month, while using less than one third the capital compared to the industry.

When asked about what is next for the company, Wein said that the year 2022 will be all about scaling.

“We are launching our second-generation Smart Insect Farm which will step up further the automation of the operation, leveraging our insectOS tech platform combining IoT sensors, climate control and production efficiency best practices,” he closes.

“While scaling farming activities, we are also launching our Pet Food products, under the YumGrubs brand, to let dog owners feed their puppies with sustainable high-quality fresh food. We believe they will love it and it is a major step to make insect protein mainstream.”

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Image Credit: Protenga

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