This startup wants cash to turn silkworms into vaccines

Every year, India’s silkworm farms export more than 9,000 metric tons of silk to China, the United Kingdom, and the US, where they are eventually used to make fashionable dresses. But for Bangalore-based biotech firm Loopworm, these silkworm farms can also be crucial for another billion-dollar industry: insect protein.

Founded in 2019 by Ankit Alok Bagaria and Abhi Gawri, Loopworm began the commercial production of a protein processed from silkworms early this year. Using a proprietary technology, Loopworm “cures” the insects using heat, steam, and water to extract a substance that has protein content.

The protein, which comes in powdered and oil forms, is sold to producers of farm feed and pet food in India.

But making animal feed is not the extent of Loopworm’s ambitions. One space it is eyeing is biopharmaceuticals, where silkworms can be processed into a cheaper form of “recombinant protein,” which is currently used to develop vaccines.

Loopworm founders Ankit Alok Bagaria (left) and Abhi Gawri / Photo credit: Loopworm

The company is currently fundraising for a series A round, which it expects to close at “less than US$10 million.” Previously, it raised US$3.4 million for its 2022 seed round.

See also: Indian insect biotech firm locks in $3.4m seed funding

“Eventually, we want to create a platform that can create any recombinant protein – whether for pharmaceuticals or the beauty industry. That’s the goal,” Bagaria says in an interview with Tech in Asia.

Economical and sustainable

India is the world’s second-largest producer of silk. The industry, known as sericulture, employs as many as 2.7 million people in the country, many of them being smallholder farmers.

Bagaria and Gawri founded Loopworm partly to increase these farmers’ income, while addressing India’s food waste crisis. While the prices of the insect protein are on par with the usual ingredients used by farm feed and pet food producers, Bagaria is banking on Loopworm’s promise of sustainability to help attract new customers, too.

“Our lands are overcultivated and our oceans are overfished. I think insect protein can serve as an alternative to help our environment heal from that production cycle,” he says.

For one, insect protein can replace fishmeal, which is a common ingredient for animal feed and has long contributed to overfishing and other damages to marine ecology.

Bagaria says Loopworm is currently spending much of its time and cash on R&D to develop more protein and nutrition-rich products for the pet food industry. While India is the firm’s primary market, it has also received orders from Thailand, Taiwan, and Japan.

At present, the company has one production facility in Bangalore, which can produce 6,000 metric tons of insect protein products a year. Bagaria says the facility is only at 15% capacity at the moment, but the firm expects this to reach 100% in the next two years.

Expanding beyond India