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).