Solena Materials raises $6.7M to scale biodegradable textile fibres

London-based biotech spinout Solena Materials has secured $6.7M in Seed funding to accelerate the production of its synthetic protein fibres, engineered to offer a sustainable and high-performance alternative to traditional textiles.

The latest funding round was led by Sir David Harding, with participation from SynBioVen and Insempra, which also backed the company’s pre-seed round. Solena will use the capital to move to a larger facility, still near Imperial’s campus, to scale up production and begin partnerships with major fashion brands. The investment follows a $4.1M Pre-Seed round in 2022, bringing Solena’s total funding to $10.8M.

The company was spun out of Imperial College London in 2022 and is based at the university’s White City Deep Tech Campus.

Solena’s fibres are designed at the molecular level using AI-powered techniques and manufactured through engineered microbes. This approach enables the company to tailor properties such as tensile strength, flexibility, and hand-feel, making the fibres well suited to a wide range of applications including fashion, sports apparel, and technical textiles.

“We’re creating protein sequences that don’t exist in nature to have the performance specifications we need while also being highly manufacturable,” said Dr James MacDonald, Solena’s CEO and co-founder. 

Solena’s fibre solution sits at the intersection of synthetic biology and materials science, a space increasingly targeted by climate-focused investors. The textile industry accounts for roughly 10 percent of global carbon emissions, and existing synthetic fibres like polyester are petroleum-based and non-biodegradable. Solena aims to tackle this by using renewable feedstocks to engineer fibres that are biodegradable and less resource-intensive than both cotton and synthetics.

“This extraordinary technology is opening up a whole new paradigm in the design of protein fibres,” said Professor Paul Freemont, co-founder and Head of Structural and Synthetic Biology at Imperial.

 “Now we’re building our own protein fibres from first principles. This will be a paradigm shift.”

“Solena is particularly exciting, not only as a new class of high-performance sustainable fibres for a wide range of applications,” added co-founder Professor Milo Shaffer, “but also as an example of a paradigm shift in accelerating materials discovery. The combination of computational design with rapid evaluation in fibre form directly feeds to scaled-up production.”