PPTI's Unibio-sponsored webinar mapped the real capital stack behind fermentation scale-up

Protein Production Technology International’s 29 January 2026 webinar, sponsored by Unibio, dug into the financing problem that kept resurfacing as fermentation companies moved beyond pilots: how to fund first-of-a-kind industrial assets when venture equity no longer covered the bill and lenders still hesitated. Click here to watch the webinar if you missed it.

• Unibio and finance specialists described how growth-stage fermentation companies blended strategic equity, project-level debt, offtake structures, and public co-investment once pilot success stopped being enough to unlock large checks.

• Panelists said many teams overestimated “readiness” by treating technical validation as commercial bankability, and pointed to execution capability, scale-up data, and contract quality as recurring gaps.

• The European Innovation Council outlined where public capital stepped in before private debt, while emphasizing that co-investment still required credible plans, governance, and evidence of market pull.

Unibio CFO Spencer D. White opened with a snapshot of how the company’s business model shaped its funding pathway. He described Unibio as a protein company using methane as its core feedstock, with industrial-scale fermentation “in production since 2021”, and argued that reactor design and unit economics determined which markets became realistic first. “Without a fundamental reduction in production costs, it is simply not possible to compete in high-volume animal feed markets such as aquaculture,” he said.

White attributed Unibio’s cost base to engineering choices that cut both CapEx and OpEx. “Gas-to-liquid mass transfer rates are up to four times higher, and energy efficiency is more than five times higher,” he said, describing the net effect as lower production costs and competitive pricing in target markets.

From there, the session moved quickly from technology narratives to financing mechanics. White characterized Unibio’s current position as an increasingly layered mix of capital sources. “Really, it’s the complexity of the funding sources,” he said. “They’re very interwoven, but they’re also beginning to layer.” He added that getting closer to recurring revenue changed what became possible. “Our proximity to recurring commercial revenue streams means we can start to diversify how we think about funding future joint ventures in the pipeline, because we’ll have a combination of internal funds and access to external debt, which is not something that was available prior to commercialization,” he said.

On when the conversation shifted from proving the tech to proving the business, White pointed to a specific milestone. “I think the real transitional milestone was the first master license back in 2016,” he said. “That was the point where the focus shifted from pure technology development, at pilot or demo scale, to commercial applications and markets, demand, and pricing.”

Aakriti Mehta, Director of Origination at Channel Capital, said that shift was where many companies started to discover they were not as “finance-ready” as they assumed. “When you’re at the pilot stage and the pilot is successful, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of proving that the technology works,” she said. “But when you start speaking to capital providers, whether equity or debt, the focus shifts very quickly to commercialization and the returns that can realistically come out of the project.” In her view, management capability became a decisive variable. “Bringing in people with business development and commercial partnership experience, for example, becomes essential,” Mehta said, especially when moving into licensing and joint venture structures.

Diana Rucinschi, EIC Fund advisor and Investment Coordinator at the European Innovation Council (EISMEA), echoed the point that technical validation did not equal commercial bankability. “What we often see is companies confusing technical validation with commercial readiness,” she said, noting that process behavior could change dramatically as scale increased and as stress conditions or alternative feedstocks entered the picture. She also highlighted the recurring gap between technical founders and the commercial, manufacturing, and regulatory expertise needed to execute at scale.

David Ziskind, Managing Partner at Mach Global Advisors, described his work as helping companies translate a readiness claim into a credible plan for what “commercial scale” actually meant. He warned against assuming linear scale-up and said the hard work often started with the basics: right-sizing the next facility so it did not become either underutilized capacity or a dead end. “What is the right size facility? How do you design it so that it is neither too big nor too small?” he said.

Debt, the discussion made clear, arrived only when revenue certainty and execution risk had been reduced enough for downside-focused capital. White described debt-readiness as a function of bankable cash flows. “As you’d expect, it comes down to proximity to recurring revenues and the certainty around those revenues,” he said. He added that moving too early could backfire when scale-out or process performance did not match expectations and “revenues don’t materialize”. For Unibio, he said, debt discussions focused on the project layer rather than the parent company. “For us, at least for now, the only debt we’re contemplating, and actively working with, sits at the level of the production joint ventures,” he said.

Mehta summarized lender logic in blunt terms. “If you take a step back and think about debt, it’s a fixed-income product. It’s not about upside; it’s entirely about downside protection,” she said, adding that financiers ultimately asked, “how do we make sure we get our money back?” That pushed attention toward operational capability, contract structures, and whether the company could reliably service commitments.

First-of-a-kind risk sat at the center of that lender skepticism. White described the early posture as unforgiving. “Guilty until proven innocent is probably the mindset at that stage,” he said, pointing to operational consistency at larger scale and commercial certainty as the two hardest clusters of concern. On the commercial side, he described a timing mismatch: “Lenders want certainty through contracted offtake, but potential buyers are typically operating on shorter-term contracts,” he said, adding that buyers were often unwilling to commit far in advance of a facility delivering product.

Ziskind argued that credibility on FOAK cost assumptions came from disciplined scale-up and rigorous project planning. “Have you run the process at 10 liters, then 100 liters, then 1,000 liters? That progression matters,” he said, and he urged teams to sweat infrastructure details early so changes did not trigger wholesale redesign later.

Public capital was presented as a bridge in the period before private debt became comfortable. Rucinschi said the EIC stepped in where private lenders typically demanded stability and contracted offtake that many companies could not yet demonstrate. She described EIC support as including “an equity component, typically between €1 million and €10 million (US$1.2 million to US$12.0 million)”, alongside grant funding, and emphasized that the EIC co-invested rather than investing alone.

The webinar ended on a shared conclusion that the bottleneck was less about absolute capital availability and more about project maturity. “I don’t think fermentation, as a sector, has a shortage of capital per se,” Mehta said, arguing that commercialization and operational readiness still lagged. Ziskind pointed to a shortage of “validated, shovel-ready projects”, while Rucinschi described the missing piece as “a clear and credible pathway to bankability”.

White’s closing line captured the standard the panel kept returning to. “To attract capital, you need compelling, risk-adjusted returns,” he said.

The full session, Financing a First-of-a-Kind: How Growth-Stage Fermentation Companies Bridge the Capital Gap, is available to watch on demand.