New Wave Biotech links up with Nurasa to fast-track biomanufactured ingredients from lab to market

New Wave Biotech has entered a commercial partnership with Nurasa to help accelerate the journey from research and development to market-ready products for sustainable food and ingredient innovations. The collaboration brought together New Wave Biotech’s digital bioprocess simulation capabilities and Nurasa’s food innovation, scale-up, and commercialization ecosystem spanning Asia, with relevance extending into Europe.

• New Wave Biotech partnered with Temasek-owned Nurasa to support the scale-up of sustainable food and ingredient technologies from R&D to commercial production.

• Nurasa’s ecosystem gained access to bioprocess simulation, techno-economic analysis, and life-cycle assessment tools to reduce cost, time, and risk in scale-up decisions.

• The partnership connected digital modeling with pilot-scale facilities, regulatory expertise, and go-to-market pathways across Asia and Europe.

Announced today (14 January 2026), the partnership was designed to address persistent challenges faced by food-tech and biomanufacturing companies as they attempted to move beyond the laboratory. While advances in fermentation and bioprocessing had delivered a growing pipeline of novel ingredients, many companies continued to struggle with predicting performance, cost, and environmental impact at scale, often discovering problems only after committing significant capital.

Under the agreement, companies within Nurasa’s ecosystem gained access to New Wave Biotech’s Bioprocess Foresight platform. The software enabled users to virtually test thousands of downstream processing scenarios, from separation through to drying, while simultaneously assessing cost structures and environmental trade-offs through integrated techno-economic analysis and life-cycle assessment. This allowed technical and commercial teams to evaluate yield, throughput, and sustainability early in development, long before infrastructure or manufacturing investments were locked in.

New Wave Biotech disclosed that its platform had already demonstrated the ability to reduce physical experimentation by up to 90% and cut unit costs by more than half. Applied within Nurasa’s network, the tools were expected to help startups and established ingredient companies reduce scale-up risk, accelerate time-to-market, and improve profitability by making clearer decisions earlier.

The collaboration also addressed a less tangible but equally important hurdle: translating complex engineering and biological decisions into outcomes that investors, partners, and commercial teams could understand. By linking process behavior directly to cost and sustainability metrics, the partners aimed to give companies a clearer, lower-risk pathway toward commercial production.

Nurasa, which was wholly owned by Temasek, contributed its Asia-wide infrastructure and commercialization capabilities to the partnership. These included food-grade pilot facilities, application and product development expertise, and established regulatory and go-to-market partnerships across the region. For New Wave Biotech, the relationship expanded its reach while embedding its digital tools within a broader, end-to-end support system for companies looking to scale or enter Asian markets.

Samson Lee, Strategic Partnerships Manager of Nurasa, said the collaboration aligned with Singapore’s ambitions in sustainable food and biomanufacturing. “Singapore is strengthening its position as a hub for scalable, sustainable nutrition and biomanufacturing innovation,” Lee said. “Integrating New Wave Biotech’s bioprocess simulation and TEA and LCA contextualisation capabilities into our platform of offerings strengthened our ability to guide both startups and corporates toward commercially viable production, not just technical validation.”

Lee added that the partnership enhanced Nurasa’s ability to bring solutions to market with greater confidence and reduced risk, using Singapore as a regional launchpad for globally relevant food and ingredient products.

From New Wave Biotech’s perspective, the agreement reinforced the company’s focus on downstream processing, an area often cited as a bottleneck in biomanufacturing scale-up. Zoe Yu Tung Law, Co-Founder and CEO of New Wave Biotech, said scaling depended on understanding the commercial implications of technical choices, not just the science itself.

“Scaling biomanufacturing depended on understanding not just how a process behaved, but what that meant for cost, yield and sustainability,” Law said. “Our platform predicted technical outcomes and contextualised them through TEA and LCA, giving teams clear, data-driven insight at every stage of development.”

Law said partnering with Nurasa enabled New Wave Biotech to support both startups and established companies as they progressed from lab-scale work to commercially viable manufacturing, whether they were expanding in Asia or targeting global markets.

The partnership linked digital modeling with real-world scale-up environments, combining virtual experimentation with pilot-scale validation and market access. Both companies stated that this integration was intended to strengthen the commercial pathway for sustainable nutrition and biomanufactured ingredients, particularly as companies faced growing pressure to demonstrate not only technical feasibility but also economic and environmental performance.