Paris-based baCta, an industrial biotech startup developing an AI-powered bioproduction platform for industrial ingredients, has closed a €7 million seed funding round led by LocalGlobe and Daphni, with participation from OVNI Capital and several business angels, including founders of Phagos, Genomines and Mistral AI.
Read our earlier interview with Mathieu Nohet, CEO and co-founder of baCta.
Demand for industrial ingredients is rising, but current production methods, such as extraction from limited natural sources or petrochemical synthesis, remain costly, seasonal and exposed to geopolitical and climate risks. While bioproduction offers an alternative, developing high-yield industrial strains has traditionally been a slow and expensive trial-and-error process.
Founded by Mathieu Nohet and Marie Rouquette, baCta aims to address this challenge by enabling more sustainable production of high-value molecules. The company uses AI and precision fermentation to program microorganisms as molecular factories for industrial ingredient manufacturing.
Its baCtaForge platform combines advances in synthetic biology, robotics and generative AI to explore genomic regions, long-range interactions and regulatory pathways often overlooked by conventional engineering. The platform applies bio-based reinforcement learning to reduce development time and costs.
Commenting on the development, Mathieu Nohet, founder and CEO of baCta, said the industry is entering a phase in which microorganisms can serve as programmable molecular factories capable of producing organic molecules at a commercial scale.
The new funding will be used to scale up production by validating industrial processes at pilot and commercial stages, leveraging a strategic partnership with a French industrial player to access production capacity, and initiating commercialisation. The company also plans to expand baCtaForge’s capabilities to additional high-value ingredients.
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