Germany-based non-dairy cheese developer Formo raised $50m in series A funding yesterday from investors including M Ventures, the corporate venturing subsidiary of pharmaceuticals and electronics producer Merck Group.
Venture capital firm EQT Ventures led the round, which also featured Elevat3 Capital, Lowercarbon Capital, Lionheart Ventures, Happiness Capital, Agronomics, CPT Capital, Good Seed Ventures, Grazia Equity and angel investor Albert Wenger.
Founded in 2019, Formo has developed a method of creating cheese that uses microorganisms which are encoded with milk protein DNA sequences and then fermented.
The startup had previously received $4.7m in seed capital from Merck, Agronomics, CPT Capital, Good Seed Ventures and Grazia Equity in December 2019, when it was still known as Legendairy Foods.
Formo’s co-founders said in a statement: “This new funding will allow us to turbomegacharge our progress – pulling in more of the best brains around, move into a new Formo HQ, accelerate our research, get the world tasting our cheeses and build up capacity to produce proteins at serious scale.
“We are taking the dairy parlour of the future microscopic and then back up to a size that can get in the ring with industrial dairy, gloves off.”
