FlexSea’s biodegradable plastics attract £3m investment
01 FlexSea, a startup with its roots at Imperial College London, has announced the completion
02 of a seed round worth £3 million in equity and grants. The investment will help the company
03 commercialize a range of sustainable packaging solutions it has developed, based on plastics
04 derived from seaweed. The aim is to address the catastrophic impact of conventional plastics
05 on the environment, in particular the single-use plastic products that persist in the ocean for
06 many hundreds of years after they are discarded. In contrast, the biodegradable plastics
07 devised by FlexSea will break down in the sea or the soil within a matter of weeks.
08 Carlo Fedeli, the co-founder and Chief Executive of FlexSea, first started to think about
09 biodegradable plastics during the COVID pandemic. “I noticed the amount of plastic packaging
10 that was piling up at home, because of the online groceries and other deliveries we relied on
11 at the time, and I just had enough,” he says. He started looking into the biodegradable plastics
12 that were already available, and found that they often had shortcomings. Some didn’t actually
13 break down very rapidly under day-to-day environmental conditions, while others involved
14 unsustainable production methods. For example, plastics derived from seaweed are often made
15 from brown seaweed, which is usually harvested from nature, rather than the commonly
16 cultivated red seaweed. He set out to develop a thin-film plastic from red seaweed. “By the
17 end of lockdown I had the first prototype, a transparent flexi-film, and that is still the backbone
18 technology of our solvent-cast thin films,” he says.
19 FlexSea was set up in 2021 with co-founder Thibaut Monfort-Micheo. Their first home was
20 at Scale Space, on the White City Campus, and they received support from across Imperial's
21 enterprising ecosystem. In 2021 they joined the Centre for Climate Change Innovation’s
22 Greenhouse Accelerator, and in 2022 they took part in Imperial’s Venture Catalyst Challenge,
23 winning the energy and environment track. "FlexSea has the potential to change the pattern
24 of human consumption of plastic and therefore change the sustainability path of our planet,”
25 says Stephan Morais, Managing General Partner of lead investor Indico Capital. "This
26 investment will allow us ___ (make) significant progress and penetrate the market effectively,”
27 says Carlo Fedeli, the co-founder and Chief Executive of FlexSea.
(Available at: www.imperial.ac.uk/news/248154/flexseas-biodegradable-plastics-attract-3m-investment/ – text especially adapted for this test).