Alabama-based Van Heron Labs, a biotechnology company, announced on Tuesday that it has secured $1.1M (approximately €1M) in a seed round of funding led by FoodLabs, a Berlin-based early-stage VC and venture studio for food, health, and climate.

The company will use the funds to improve its technologies and existing offerings and help bring new innovative technologies to customers.

“Van Heron Labs looks forward to using the generous support and funding from FoodLabs to advance our goal of making biological innovation better, faster, and cheaper. By fueling the new bio-economy, we feel that our customers can optimise their systems and bring technologies to overcome critical global challenges to market,” says Dr. Rebecca C. Vaught, Founder & CEO of Van Heron Labs.

Van Heron Labs: Fueling bio-economy

Founded by Dr. Rebecca Vaught, Dr. Alec Santiago, and Nithin Parsan in February 2020, at the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Van Heron Labs uses genomics, bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology to improve how cells are cultured and harnessed.

Van Heron Labs’ technologies optimise these by improving cell health, proliferation, and productivity – often by fold-changes. Without such improvements, many industries, such as cell therapy, cultivated meat, and biomaterials, often remain impractical and unscalable. 

The company works across multiple industries with a focus on enhancing cell-based processes and technologies.

The company aims to use its technology to provide critical infrastructure for addressing global issues such as food and materials production, pandemic response, and cancer therapeutics.

The company’s automated flagship platform uses AI and bioinformatics to determine the optimal cellular fuel, including a full range of macro and micronutrients based on genetic data. This optimises processes and cell systems at a molecular level.

The Van Heron Labs team generated supporting data and completed two successful commercial pilots for a COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer within two months of founding the company. 

Since then, Van Heron Labs has continued improving its flagship platform and developed multiple new products and services to support biotherapeutics, precision medicine, food, biomaterials, and synthetic biology companies, among others.

The investor

Based out of Berlin, FoodLabs has built and invested in more than 50 early-stage companies in the largest areas of impact since 2016.

The VC has been an early investor in some of the European startups, including Infinite Roots, Formo, Infarm, Meatable, and Klim. 

In FoodLabs Studio, the company identifies new opportunities to change the food industry, along with the entrepreneurs and scientists who have what it takes to empower the transformation.

“We are excited to lead the funding round in Van Heron Labs, as we firmly believe that their innovative approach to optimising cellular nutrition has the potential to revolutionise multiple industries, including biopharma, biomanufacturing, foodtech, and agriculture,” says Julius Strauss, Investor at FoodLabs. “We are excited to be partnering with Dr. Rebecca Vaught and her team as they continue to push the boundaries of innovation in the bio-economy.”