AmphiStar, headquartered near Ghent University in Belgium, uses fermentation to convert waste streams into biosurfactants for everything from surface cleaners to personal care products. The startup is commercializing, with European backing and North American partnerships rolling out this year.
How does AmphiStar’s fermentation process turn waste into ingredients for cosmetics and household products?
The surfactant market is about 20 million tons big and worth $56 billion, yet 97% to 98% of surfactants are still produced from fossil or palm oil-based materials. AmphiStar uses waste carbohydrates from wheat, sugar and cardboard-type wood production and cooking oil or oleochemical industry sidestreams to make sustainable biosurfactants. We ferment these materials with a robust yeast called Starmarella bombicola to transform the carbohydrates into sophorolipids before a final purification process.
One of our first big successes was a limited-edition hard surface cleaner commercially launched by Ecover, a brand of the American company S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc. We are now expanding into personal and home care with smaller European brands while preparing for more commercial sales in the U.S.
How are plans for your North American expansion progressing?
North America has a huge, diverse and well-developed market that wants sustainable, locally produced materials. The U.S. also has a great deal of waste available to supply our production. The longer-term goal is to establish local production near waste streams in the U.S. and Europe, including vitamin E production sidestreams, rather than shipping waste. At the end of last year, we began a partnership with Kensing to offer home and personal care products already available in Europe to U.S. consumers. Registration of these products in the U.S. has been slower than expected, but we are working with several customers toward a significant commercial launch by year’s end.
How do you reduce emissions while scaling production?
Product life cycle assessments show that our processes generate eight to 10 times lower CO₂ emissions and lower water consumption than the conventional surfactant industry. Our second-generation products also have about four times lower CO₂ emissions than first-generation biosurfactants made from agricultural feedstocks because we do not use raw materials that compete with food production. The beauty of fermentation is that these very efficient bioprocesses also have high levels of conversion and bring costs down. We also plan to recycle as much material as possible in the treatment units of future commercial plants.
What support has helped move AmphiStar toward commercialization?
The German federal agency for disruptive innovations (SPRIND), the European Innovation Council and other Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking (CBE JU) programs have helped us build formulation capabilities and develop prototypes toward commercialization. We also had some equity coming in from venture capital funders in April 2024. We now have the AmphiNova platform, which focuses on novel biosurfactants that deliver better emulsification, foaming, detergency, mildness and sustainability, plus better costs. We are also building our AmphiPilot facility dedicated to continuous fermentation and purification, bringing major cost decreases. This will enable the development of cost-effective commercial plants capable of producing 20,000 to 30,000 tons of biosurfactants a year, with limited CapEx.
What role will people play as industries become more automated?
Automation is part of any modern plant but ours adventure is a human one, driven by a motivated team representing many different backgrounds and sharing the vision of making biosurfactants mainstream. Two years ago, we had six people on the team; today, we have 29, with more motivated talent waiting to join us. The grants, earned by convincing people that this was the right area to support, have helped us pursue talent in technology, processes, synthetic biology, sales and business development, and formulation of specialized prototypes for customers. The next step is to grow the work force in other countries.
What partners, connections and factors will help the company grow faster?
AmphiStar is a spinoff of Ghent University and the Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant (BBEPP). The university brought us know-how from over 15 years of research and innovative work on novel molecules. BBEPP provided one of Europe’s largest nonprofit fermentation facilities for process development. The whole area is also a well-known magnet for biotech talent. A lot of AmphiStar's people either have a Ph.D. from the university or have worked at BBEPP.
Europe’s increasing environmental stringency facilitates the penetration of our products. Regulations are important to how fast we can grow, so we are working closely with regulatory bodies to make waste use requirements more adaptable. It is absolutely critical for the government to accelerate new product registrations, knowing that biosurfactants bear much less risk of toxicity from ingredients such as 1,4-dioxane, a volatile organic compound associated with conventional surfactants.
How resilient is your business model to supply chain disruptions?
We do not have disruption of waste. In a certain way, other supply chain disruptions are positive for us. When you have transportation problems, palm oil is not growing in Europe, it is growing in Asia, Malaysia and Indonesia. This pushes big companies or customers to move towards local production, and biosurfactants are made from locally-generated waste. What we are trying to do is use more different types of waste.
In a chemical process, changing the raw material changes the final product. In fermentation, yeast produces the same final product as long as it receives suitable nutrients. This flexibility allows us to adapt to feedstocks wherever future commercial plants are built without jeopardizing the quality of the final product.
What are your priorities for the next few years, and how will you manage such rapid growth?
We have targeted the home and personal care markets from the beginning, but are looking ahead to agriculture, soil remediation and coatings. Our strategy starts with toll manufacturing before investments into regional commercial plants to fulfill growing biosurfactant demands in longer-term expansion targets such as the Asia-Pacific and South America. Meanwhile, we are building a global network of partners to accelerate access to all markets favorable to biosurfactants.
