Volare raises €7.1M and opens its insect protein factory in Pori
Three of Europe's best-funded insect companies died inside eighteen months. Volare opened a 10,000 m2 plant in Pori on a €15 million budget and raised €7.1 million to ramp it.
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Founded 2021 · Helsinki, Finland
Volare, the Finnish company turning food-industry side streams into insect protein, has raised €7.1 million through the Springvest platform and opened its first industrial factory, a 10,000 m² plant in Pori built to a €15 million budget.
€7.1 million raised through Springvest
Volare announced the round on 26 October 2026, the same day it opened the plant it calls Volare 01. The money came through Springvest, the Finnish investment platform, from new and existing investors including Maki.vc (Tech.eu, 26 October 2026). No lead investor is named and the company attaches no stage label, so this is a round and nothing more precise than that.
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The €15 million figure traveling with the announcement is the factory’s capital budget, a separate number from the €7.1 million raised. The new capital goes into ramping Volare 01 and preparing a second facility, which the company says will carry roughly five times the protein capacity of the first.
Volare raised €26 million in May 2025 to build that first plant (Tech.eu, 27 May 2025). Nine months of construction later, the company reports the project landed on schedule and inside budget. In industrial scale-up that sentence is the news.
A VTT spin-off running on four people per shift
Volare was founded in 2021 on technology out of VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland by chief executive Jarna Hyvönen, chief scientific officer Tuure Parviainen and chief technology officer Matti Tähtinen. Our records put the team at 16 people, with the company headquartered in Helsinki.
Volare 01 sits inside a former newspaper printing hall in Pori and targets up to 5,000 tonnes of insect protein and 2,000 tonnes of insect oil a year, grown from black soldier fly larvae fed on side streams the food industry already throws away. It is designed to run with four people per shift, and it is a thousandfold step up from the demonstration plant the company operated for more than four years.
A significant share of that capacity is already sold, under offtake agreements with the aquafeed producer Skretting and an unnamed global chemical company. Volare has been selling protein commercially since 2022, into dog treats with Alvar Pet, cat food for Dagsmark, rainbow trout feed with Alltech Fennoaqua and organic poultry feed.
The company puts its own model at four to ten times less capex, about 50% fewer employees and 30% less energy in end-product processing than competing insect producers, with protein meal above 90% digestibility (Volare, 26 October 2026). Those are its own figures, and nobody independent has audited them.
A feed market growing 12% a year while fishmeal stands still
Europe’s insect feed market was worth $0.60 billion in 2026 and is forecast to reach $1.07 billion by 2031, a 12.3% CAGR (Research and Markets, June 2026). Twelve percent a year is steady industrial growth, and in this corner of European foodtech it is the honest number to plan against.
The pressure comes from the supply side. The FAO’s 2026 report found 84.5% of assessed marine fish stocks fished at or beyond maximum sustainable levels in 2023, and Hyvönen says the industries buying fishmeal are growing 5 to 10% a year while the fishmeal itself is not. Remember: aquafeed buyers are shopping for tonnes that will still exist next year, and that is a procurement problem before it is an environmental one.
On scale, €7.1 million is modest. In our own fundraising data, Edonia took €15 million at Series B on 6 October 2026, co-led by SWEN Blue Ocean 2 and Asterion Ventures, and Standing Ovation raised €30 million for precision fermentation dairy proteins. FlyFeed, the closest comparison in insect protein, raised €2.7 million at seed back in October 2022. Volare is taking a top-up beside a factory that is already standing.
Pori opened in the year three insect companies closed
Europe has spent a decade funding this sector generously and burying it quietly. Ÿnsect raised more than €600 million and was liquidated in 2025. ENORM raised €50 million and went bankrupt in October 2025. FarmInsect raised about €16.2 million and ceased operations in 2026 (Tech.eu, 26 October 2026). Three of the continent’s best-capitalized insect companies disappeared inside eighteen months.
What did Pori do differently? The good news in this round is how unglamorous the answer is. One converted building. A €15 million budget against the nine-figure ones. Nine months of construction. Offtake signed before the doors opened. Four people per shift. I keep hearing that Europe cannot industrialize its deeptech, and what I see here is a company that industrialized on a budget its liquidated rivals would have spent on a pilot line.
The financing is worth watching too. A Finnish retail investment platform and Maki.vc, a Helsinki early-stage fund, carried a factory opening, with no American growth fund anywhere in the sentence. That is a small round by any measure, and it is also the kind of domestic capital that stays when a sector falls out of fashion. What we are seeing is an insect protein company funded the way an industrial business gets funded, which is what it always was.
The test arrives next. A second plant at five times the capacity is where insect companies have historically broken, and Volare has to prove its numbers at a scale nobody in Europe has reached profitably. Watch the offtake agreements. If the second factory signs its buyers before it breaks ground, Europe will have its first insect protein company that works. Let’s see it get built!
