Making fermentation industrially competitive.

Founded:

2018

Tech

Industrial Biotechnology

Forward.one entry point:

Early-stage investor, active through scale-up

Headquarters

Delft, The Netherlands

The Challenge

Fermentation is the backbone of the bio-based economy. From food and cosmetics to chemicals and materials, it underpins many of the products we use every day. Yet despite major advances in synthetic biology, manufacturing cost remains the biggest barrier to large-scale adoption of bio-based alternatives to fossil-derived chemicals.

Traditional batch fermentation is slow, additive-heavy, and capital-intensive. Yield losses, downstream separation costs, and process inefficiencies prevent many promising bio-routes from ever becoming commercially viable.

DAB.bio was founded to remove this bottleneck.

FORWARD.one involvement

We invested in DAB.bio because it delivers a step-change in fermentation economics, not a marginal improvement. Its patented FAST platform (Fermentation Accelerated by Separation Technology) enables continuous fermentation by integrating separation directly into the process. This dramatically increases productivity while cutting costs by 20–50% or more.

This directly aligns with our Climate Tech strategy: enabling scalable, cost-competitive alternatives to fossil-based production. DAB.bio stands out through its smart integration of proven technologies into a compact, industrially deployable system, rooted in world-class research from TU Delft.

Beyond capital, we have supported DAB.bio hands-on, from hiring and governance to follow-on financing, backing the team as it scaled from lab validation to industrial deployment.

The technology is being commercialised through development agreements with a suite of large-cap chemicals and bio-manufacturing companies. Our vision is to roll out our fermentation technology across all leading manufacturers.

Eric van der Meer

Co-founder & CEO

The bio-economy only scales when manufacturing costs collapse. DAB.bio attacks the hardest part of the value chain; production, with engineering discipline and industrial realism. This is how climate tech moves from promise to profit.

Results

DAB.bio is turning fermentation from a cost center into a competitive advantage:

Breakthrough cost reductions in fermentation, unlocking large-scale deployment of bio-based chemicals.
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Continuous fermentation capability, reducing reliance on additives and improving yield and efficiency.
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Strong commercial momentum, with revenue growing more than 2× year-on-year, driven by development agreements with leading chemicals and bio-manufacturing companies.
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Material climate impact, enabling replacement of fossil-derived inputs across multiple high-volume industries.