A Falkirk-based biotech engineering company has secured more than £2.5m in funding to commercialise its bio-separation technology for pharmaceutical and food manufacturers.
Ufraction8 got the funding through a combination of private equity investment and grants to let it expand its existing facilities, grow its team, scale its technology, and deploy large-scale tests with prospective customers.
It hopes to make manufacturing more sustainable with its bio-separation instruments, designed to let more efficient engineering of bio-based products, including microalgae-based foods, mammalian cell-based drugs, or yeast-based products such as beer or medicines.
The company’s technology uses microfluidics to enable gentle separation of cell-based products from the liquid in which they are grown.
Dr Brian Miller, co-founder of Ufraction8, said: “We are excited about this successful investment round and the new partners supporting our mission to produce the best-ever microscale liquid-solid separation systems.”
Dr Monika Tomecka, Ufraction8 co-founder, added: “This significant investment, along with the immense and highly successful bio-manufacturing sector track record of our new partners, will enable Ufraction8 to grow faster than ever before.”
Ufraction8 was founded in 2017 and has progressed from a lab-scale prototype to a mini-industrial demonstrator, currently being used for the customer trials.
In 2019, the company opened a fully-owned subsidiary in Poznan, which was awarded a major grant last year from the National Centre for Research and Development in Poland.
The support let the Polish subsidiary to open new facilities and employ a team of designers and engineers to boost the speed of Ufraction8’s technology development.
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