Zymofix raises Series A to build €6M microbial plant in Deinze

Zymofix, the Ghent-based maker of microbial crop inputs, has raised a Series A led by First Imagine! Ventures – with VP Capital, High-Tech Gründerfonds and The Nest Family Office participating – to put €6M into its first industrial manufacturing plant in Deinze, Belgium.

A round that buys fermenters, not features

The company announced the news on 30 September 2026, and the trade press picked it up on 2 October. The €6M is the investment in the Deinze facility itself, financed partly by the new equity and partly by revenue from existing customer programmes (HTGF announcement, 30 September 2026). Dealroom lists the Series A at €6M (2 October 2026); Zymofix has not broken out the equity portion separately.

First Imagine! Ventures led the round, with VP Capital, High-Tech Gründerfonds and The Nest Family Office – all existing investors, per Dealroom – following on. The plant is scheduled to start production in Q4 2027 with an initial capacity of 300 tonnes of microbial products a year, enough to treat roughly one million hectares of farmland (company announcement, 30 September 2026).

“Finding a promising microorganism is only part of the challenge,” said co-founder and CEO Emile Redant in the announcement. The hard part, in his telling, is manufacturing it reliably and at a price agriculture accepts.

From a Ghent lab to a million hectares

Founded in 2022, Zymofix grows beneficial microorganisms on biomass residues using Zyft, its solid-state fermentation and formulation platform. The team has run more than 170 microbial strains across the platform (Dealroom, 2 October 2026) and works with more than 15 customers, most of them multinational agricultural-input companies, on biostimulants, biofertilisers and biocontrol products (company announcement, 30 September 2026).

The company counts around 35 people today and expects roughly 60 by the end of 2027 as the plant ramps (HTGF announcement, 30 September 2026). Our records show a €2M round in November 2024; since then demand has outgrown the pilot line, with Zymofix saying current capacity is already exceeded by customer programmes.

Sizing the biofertiliser wave

So how big is the market this plant will feed? Global biofertilisers were worth $2.81bn in 2025 and are projected to grow at a 12.6% CAGR to $8.09bn by 2034, with Europe at $0.56bn in 2025 and a projected 11.89% growth rate (Fortune Business Insights, September 2026). Small next to synthetic fertilisers, but compounding at a pace the incumbent chemistry is not.

The amount also sits squarely in the band European agritech raises at. In our fundraising data, Gravity Gardens closed a €2.6M seed in September 2026 with VP Capital on the ticket, and Zymofix’s own November 2024 round was €2M. A €6M plant, part-paid by customers, is the logical next rung on that ladder.

Why the plant matters more than the round

“Manufacturing is exactly where Europe is thinnest,” said Boris Dorin, partner at First Imagine!, in the fund’s announcement. He is right, and not only about microbes. We fund European lab science generously; we are far slower to fund the unglamorous step where a validated process becomes tonnes shipped. I have watched that gap stall more than one promising deep-tech company.

The good news is that the capital here is the patient kind: a lead investor plus three existing backers – a family office among them – financing steel rather than burn. What to watch is the second step. Zymofix has already pencilled a €25M expansion for 2028 that would lift capacity to 2,000 tonnes a year, roughly ten million hectares (HTGF announcement, 30 September 2026). Where that cheque comes from will say more about Europe’s bio-industrial ambitions than any strategy paper.

European investors have shown this year that they will fund physical scale when the proof is in – Inovus Medical’s £15M growth round for surgical simulators and AnaCardio’s €62.5M Series B landed within the past week alone. Zymofix just added fermentation to the list. Watch Deinze!