Biotech startup seeks to strengthen seaweed industry’s value chain
- BioMara
- Mar 30
- 3 min read
Scottish startup BioMara is primed to scale production of its gut health and fibre bioactive ingredients and continue research to help bolster the value of seaweed in the West, its CEO and founder says.
Founded in 2022, BioMara has so far amassed €1.4 million (£1.2 million) in funding – €628,000 (£520,000) in investments and more than €725,000 (£600,000) in grants – for its seaweed research, tech innovations, and ingredient development.
Now, the company is seeking to raise a further €1.8 to €2.4 million by June, to fund significant manufacturing scale-up and ongoing research with universities and partners across the UK.
“The vision at the start for BioMara was to really boost the seaweed industry in general, throughout the value chain,” Jay Dignan, the company’s founder and CEO, told Vitafoods Insights. “And to do that, we saw that the only way was to find a product market fit for a value-added product, because seaweed itself as a raw material – well, the raw unit economics don't work.”
In Asia – a market with large-scale seaweed farms and very high demand for raw seaweed products –the economics work when running a seaweed business, but the same cannot be said in Western markets, he explained.
Boosting seaweed in the West, he said, requires middle input from companies able to create new, high-value products from the raw seaweed biomass. And that, he explained, is the goal behind BioMara.
He said: “The processing piece is so important to create products the market is demanding or interested in, otherwise it's impossible for the seaweed farmers to find a market and scale.”
Fucoidan and fibre bioactives
Detailing BioMara's biotech advances in the field, Dignan said its patent-pending water-based process extracts the active compound fucoidan from various seaweed species in a way that protects the ingredient’s bioactivity – something that is often lost with regular extraction methods.
He said: “That's the key to the business model, because fucoidan is the highest value part of the seaweed – so without valorising these compounds, the business model doesn't really work, because seaweed is 90% water.”
The process also leaves the rest of the seaweed biomass intact, enabling the company to create and offer a secondary high-value ingredient, which was unusual in this space because the remaining biomass is often just discarded, he said.
Today, the company has two ingredients from its process: a primary bioactive fucoidan nutraceutical ingredient, Thalivra; and a byproduct high-fibre functional food ingredient, Seafibrex, both of which had passed proof of concept in numerous pilot scale trials and are now ready for large-scale orders via a contract manufacturer.
The nutraceutical active Thalivra has been investigated for gut health and anti-inflammatory properties so far, with ongoing human trials and in vitro research projects due to end this summer. Early findings position the ingredient as an effective prebiotic, Dignan said, but other areas the company is looking at include antiviral, antimicrobial, antioxidant, and anti-ageing properties.
BioMara's Seafibrex ingredient, containing various vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and more than 50% fibre, he said presents an interesting option for food manufacturers looking to improve the overall nutritional profile of everyday foods, from meats and meat alternatives to breads, condiments, and crackers.
“Seaweed is not new,” Dignan said. “It's been around, especially in Asia, forever. So, the challenge is having verified research-backed science behind the product to differentiate.”
Manufacturing scale-up and R&D
Over the next two to three years, Dignan said the goal was for BioMara to open its first commercial-scale manufacturing plant to bring production in-house, with the longer-term goal being to open several plants globally within the next 10 years.
Research efforts will remain ongoing with UK university partners and scientific institutes, he said, given there are “thousands of different species of seaweed” left to investigate using BioMara's extraction process. And this, he said, would probably lead to more functional ingredients and application areas.
“There will be plenty more product development on the high-value supplements side of things, in particular,” the founder said.
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