Cauldron Ferm, a company working in advanced biomanufacturing, has raised $13.25 million in its Series A2 funding round. The round was led by Main Sequence Ventures, with support from Horizons Ventures, SOSV, and NGS Super.
With this, the company’s total funding has reached $26 million. It has also been included in Fast Company’s 2026 list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies.
“For biomanufacturing to compete in industrial sectors, bioproducts have to deliver on costs, scale, and quality. Bioprocess innovation is how we get there,” said Michele Stansfield, Co-founder and CEO of Cauldron. “We’re honoured to be backed by a dedicated group of experienced investors and proud to be recognised as one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies. This milestone reflects the impact of our platform at a time when governments and corporations are urgently seeking competitive bio-based solutions to address supply chain pressure.”
“NGS Super backed Cauldron because we see advanced biomanufacturing as a powerful secular trend reshaping how critical inputs are produced, driven by supply chain resilience, decarbonisation, and the need for cost competitive alternatives to traditional industrial processes,” said Ben Squires, Chief Investment Officer at NGS Super, one of the largest pension funds in Australia. “Cauldron’s continuous ‘hyper-fermentation’ platform is focused on the key constraint in the sector: improving productivity and unit economics at industrial scale. That combination of technology differentiation and real-world commercial validation is why we decided to invest.”
“Cauldron is proving that biology can run continuously, predictably, and at the volumes global supply chains demand. Hyper-fermentation closes the gap between breakthrough strains and reliable, cost-competitive production. As long-term deep tech investors – and Asia Pacific’s largest dedicated deep tech venture firm – we see this as a systemic industrial transformation,” said Phil Morle, Partner at Main Sequence Ventures. “In a market distracted by AI hype cycles, we’re backing the hard, physical work of scaling biology. That’s what builds enduring companies, and it’s why we believe Cauldron is at the forefront of making bioindustrial manufacturing commercially inevitable.”
Cauldron Ferm was founded in 2022 by Michele Stansfield and David Kestenbaum.
It is based in Orange, a town about three and a half hours west of Sydney, and has a 30,000-litre demonstration facility there.
Cauldron is working on new technology to make biomanufacturing faster and more efficient at a large scale.
Its special fermentation platform helps produce more output at lower cost, uses fewer resources, and runs smoothly in a continuous and stable way.
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