Ferm Labs raises €3M to scale fermentation-made cheese flavour

Ferm Labs, the bioprocessing startup headquartered in Zug and producing in Bolzano, has raised €3 million led by CDP Venture Capital’s Green Transition Fund, joined by Fund F, Redstone with Euregio+ and Alpine VC, and the Loacker group, to scale its fermentation-based flavour platform.

“Natural” on a European food label has always carried a cost penalty – and yet the cheapest route to an aged-cheese note may now run through a fermenter in South Tyrol. Below, I lay out who wrote the cheques on Monday, what Ferm Labs actually makes, and why a 101-year-old wafer dynasty is backing a company that turns one year old this year.

Rome’s recovery money leads, a wafer maker follows

Ferm Labs announced the €3 million round on 14 September 2026, as reported by EU-Startups and Startupticker. CDP Venture Capital led through its Green Transition Fund, the vehicle backed by NextGenerationEU money – the EU’s recovery programme, here buying fermentation capacity rather than motorways. Vienna’s Fund F joined, alongside Redstone investing with the regional vehicles Euregio+ and Alpine VC, and Loacker, the South Tyrolean wafer and confectionery group.

The company puts no stage label on the round. The money has three stated destinations: expanding bioprocessing capacity in South Tyrol, growing a European B2B sales force, and scaling R&D into new product categories.

“Ferm Labs has built an extraordinary DeepTech platform that redefines efficiency, sustainability, and flavour performance,” said Enrico Filì, Head of the Green Transition Fund at CDP Venture Capital, in the announcement.

Whey goes in, aged cheese comes out

Founded in 2025 by serial entrepreneurs Stephanie Lüpold (CEO) and Mattia Baroni (CTO), Ferm Labs sits across two borders by design: a Zug headquarters and a production and R&D site in Bolzano. The company builds proprietary bioprocessing platforms that make clean-label B2B flavour systems for food manufacturers – selling to the industry, not to the supermarket shelf.

The flagship is Kokumesan, a flavour system for industrial cheese applications. It upcycles liquid whey – a by-product dairies pay to dispose of – into kokumi peptide profiles that deliver an aged-cheese taste. The company says its non-GMO microbes cut fermentation from weeks to hours, claim 75% cost-in-use savings in manufacturing formulations, and let producers drop the cheese content of a recipe from 20% to under 1%. Those are the company’s own figures, stated in its announcement; no customer has published its numbers yet. “The era of flavour trade-offs is officially over,” is how Lüpold put it – founders announce, markets verify.

A $8.13 billion market compounding at 6.28%

The segment Ferm Labs sells into is sizeable and steady rather than explosive. The global flavour enhancer market stands at $8.13 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $11.03 billion by 2031, a 6.28% CAGR (Mordor Intelligence, September 2026). The company itself points at a bigger prize in its announcement: a combined US and European industrial cheese market it values at €68 billion.

Our own records show the pattern this round belongs to. In March, Bari’s Foreverland raised €6M for cocoa-free chocolate alternatives; in April, the UK’s Clean Food Group raised £4.5M to scale yeast-derived oils from food waste. Three European rounds inside six months, each fermenting a cheaper, cleaner substitute for an expensive agricultural input – at a 6.28% market growth rate, these companies are betting on substitution, not on the tide.

When the customer sits at the cap table

So what does a €3 million cheque tell us that a €300 million one does not? Look at who is around this table. A state-owned Italian fund deploying EU recovery money, two Alpine regional vehicles, a Vienna VC and a family-owned confectionery group that has been buying flavour ingredients for a century. Loacker is the signal: when a potential customer invests at this stage, it is underwriting its own supply chain, not chasing a multiple.

The good news is that Europe is unusually well built for this play. We have the dairy by-product streams, the food-industry buyers within a day’s drive of Bolzano, and – through vehicles like the Green Transition Fund – public capital that treats upcycling as green infrastructure. The US still out-funds us on food-tech hype cycles; on turning waste streams into ingredient revenue, the density is here.

What to watch next: whether Kokumesan lands a named industrial customer, and whether the claimed 75% cost saving survives contact with a procurement department. Every European round of this kind is logged in our fundraising data. The fermenters are running – keep watching what comes out of them.