Biomaterials start-up altM has raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Omnivore. The round saw participation of investors including Theia Ventures, Thai Wah Ventures, Sanjiv Rangrass, Neha Mudaliar, Maninder Gulati from OYO, Mirik Gogri from Spectrum Impact, and Paula Mariwala from Aureolis Ventures.
altM is Omnivore’s first investment from its third fund, which recently had a first close at $150 million. This is also the firm’s fourth investment under its OmniX Bio initiative, which was set up in 2021 to back early-stage agrifood life science start-ups.
Apoorv Garg, CEO and co-founder at altM, said, “The scale-up of technology from a laboratory bench to commercial production is not a trivial undertaking. Production scale-up is often the ‘death valley’ for biotech start-ups. Our focus on go-to-market strategy, execution, and production scale-up will be the differentiator to most endeavors we see in the world of biomaterials today.”
Mark Kahn, managing partner at Omnivore, said, “With Apoorv and Yugal's background in manufacturing excellence, altM's entry into industrial alternative materials will hasten the global shift towards sustainability and circularity. Omnivore is very excited to be a part of their journey as we kick off our new fund.”
The company aims to develop and manufacture scalable biomaterials to help large industries reduce their carbon footprints across their supply chains. The start-up uses lignocellulosic agricultural residues as their raw material to produce advanced materials as alternatives to unsustainable incumbents. Given its sustainability potential and functional properties, lignocellulosic biomass offers a unique technological appeal to form a family of materials.