This week, BioBoost, the Horizon-funded bioeconomy accelerator based in Barcelona, took an active role in shaping the future of Europe’s circular bioeconomy. On Monday 24th and Tuesday 25th, the team participated in the “Pitch Perfect & Boost the European Bioeconomy 2025” (Pitch Perfect BioeconomyPitch Perfect Bioeconomyhttps://www.pitchperfectbioeconomy.eu) event in Brussels. On Wednesday, they visited the Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant (BBEPP) (https://www.bbeu.org/news/), one of Europe’s flagship scale-up facilities for bio-based processes.
The goal was clear: understand where European bioeconomy innovation is heading, and confront head-on one of the sector’s most stubborn barriers, the lack of attractive conditions for private investment in circular bioeconomy.
Why BioBoost went to Brussels
Tracking the pulse of the European bioeconomy
Pitch Perfect brought together technology developers, corporates, clusters and investors from across Europe. For BioBoost, it was a chance to benchmark Catalan initiatives against the wider European landscape, identify emerging technologies, and spot potential collaborators.
BioBoost acts as a one stop shop for bioeconomy projects, helping them move from small project to bankable investment case. To play that role credibly, the team needs direct exposure to real market dynamics, investor sentiment and technological trends. Brussels provided that reality check.
Talking to investors about current strategies and obstacles
The main reason for Bioboost’s presence was to sit down with public funds representatives to learn about their view on risk-sharing mechanisms to boost private investment in environmental and social-positive circular projects and to stablish collaborations for the validation of our developing proposals.
Because circular bioeconomy projects are rich in environmental and social value, but often poor in the risk-return profile that mainstream capital requires and projects tend to:
- Have long-term returns
- Operate in uncertain or immature markets
- Involve high technological and regulatory risks
- Require coordination among many different stakeholders
The outcome is predictable: investors perceive high risk, unclear exits and complex governance. Interest exists, but deals do not.
We want to know
- What do funds need to feel comfortable entering circular bioeconomy deals?
- Where are the barriers that public support could unlock?
- How can instruments be designed so they are actually usable by investors and banks?
The conversations and contacts gathered at Pitch Perfect will directly feed into the design and testing of BioBoost’s financial solutions and have been the seed for the collaborating development of real need investment tools to be shared across Europe.
From lab to industry: a visit to Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant
On Wednesday, the BioBoost team traveled to Ghent to visit the Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant (BBEPP), one of Europe’s leading open-access pilot and demonstration facilities for biobased processes, which, fun fact! It used to be a fire station.
BBEPP offers a complete infrastructure to scale up processes that convert renewable feedstocks into biochemicals, biomaterials, biofuels and other bioproducts. Its capabilities span:
- Biomass pretreatment and fractionation
- Fermentation and biocatalysis
- Green chemistry and downstream processing
- Integrated process development from lab to industrially relevant scale
The Ghent visit reinforced a key message: financing concepts alone are not enough. The plant thrives with professionals offering not only the infrastructure but also several opportunities for development support, such as private counseling, group troubleshooting, community, the ProteINNClub, and some more. Here, scale-up infrastructure and project-development assistance if bioeconomy ventures help cross the “valley of death.”
A step forward for investable circular bioeconomy
By joining Pitch Perfect in Brussels, BioBoost has taken a concrete step toward its mission: making circular bioeconomy projects in Catalonia and across Europe genuinely investable.
The exchanges with funds and institutions will help ensure that the financing solutions developed within the project respond to real market needs, while the connection to industrial infrastructure underlines that impact will only materialise when finance, technology and implementation capacity are aligned.
BioBoost will keep working at that intersection, so that Europe’s bioeconomy is not only innovative on paper, but bankable in practice.
If you are an investor and would like to join our mission, we are more than happy to arrange a meeting to discuss any of these topics.
