AlgaleX, a startup developing microalgae-cultivation technology, announced on 10 July that it had secured ¥350m (about $2m) in a Series A funding round.
The company was founded in 2021 and is headquartered in Uruma, Okinawa Prefecture.
Products already on sale under the Umamo brand
Japan’s fish catch peaked in 1984 at roughly 13m tonnes. By 2022 it had fallen to less than 4m tonnes, a third of that level. This is not simply a matter of fewer people working in Japanese fisheries, or of falling demand. There is a concern that fish are becoming scarcer worldwide.
In 2006 Boris Worm, a Canadian marine biologist, and his co-authors published an analysis in Science projecting that wild-caught fish would be off the table by 2048. The findings have, however, been questioned. Set aside the specific date of 2048, though, and the forces degrading the marine environment—global warming and the flow of plastics into the sea among them—are real enough. Japan’s shrinking catch is one expression of them.
Even if wild stocks keep dwindling, aquaculture might seem to offer a way out. But AlgaleX points out that farmed fish are fed on wild fish. Without the protein and the omega-3 fatty acids, DHA among them, that wild fish supply, the company explains, farmed fish cannot grow.
So AlgaleX has developed a technique for cultivating DHA-rich microalgae on a growth medium made from food waste, notably the lees left over from awamori. Awamori is the distilled spirit of Okinawa, AlgaleX’s home prefecture.
It has also built an AI cultivation-control system, Touji-24, which monitors and adjusts the culture continuously. A touji is the master brewer of Japan’s national drinks—awamori, but also sake and shochu. The name casts the system as a touji watching over the culture, and doing so around the clock.
Products are already on sale. Since 2023 the company has been building Umamo, a brand of foodstuffs made from the cultivated algae, which it says deliver more nutrients than wild fish do. The technique for growing the algae on awamori lees to make Umamo has been patented.
Even so, AlgaleX’s chief executive, Daichi Takada, says that the goal is not to make tasty algae, but to use the technology to carry the sea into the future. The idea, in other words, is to use the technology to make feed for farmed fish and so put marine resources on a more sustainable footing. Getting there means clearing several hurdles, among them cutting the cost of cultivation and producing feed at scale.
ANA Holdings and Takunan Honsha among the investors
The Series A was led by the CJS No. 2 Investment Limited Partnership. Also taking part were the ANA Mirai Creation Fund, the corporate venture-capital arm of ANA Holdings, along with several other venture-capital firms. Local Okinawan companies have also invested, among them Takunan Honsha, a steel-related business.
The money will go towards strengthening the development of Touji-24, rolling out bespoke cultivation technology to corporate clients and recruitment.
Takada commented that he hopes the funds will allow the company to join forces with more businesses and individuals, growing algae and microbes from food waste and hastening the arrival of a society in which such waste is reborn as new nutrients.
