AmphiStar's EIC Accelerator Brews Detergent From Food Waste

Surfactants are the molecules that make soap work, and the world makes about 20 million tonnes of them a year, mostly from petroleum and palm oil. They end up in shampoo, toothpaste, paint, ink and construction materials. AmphiStar, founded in Ghent in 2021 as a spin-off of Ghent University and the Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant, ferments them instead, using the yeast Starmerella bombicola on waste and side streams from the food industry, including supermarket food waste, in a process the company compares to brewing beer.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, SurfACT, at its March 2025 cut-off for blended finance, and CORDIS records a grant of €2,499,999 from November 2025 to October 2027. The fermentation numbers in the project are the ones that matter: titres above 200 grams a litre and productivity above 2 grams per litre per hour, with CO2 emissions from surfactant production falling by more than 70% when second-generation feedstocks are used.

It has already been in a bottle

AmphiStar's strongest claim is small and concrete: in 2023 it says it brought the first waste-based biosurfactant to market with Ecover, the Belgian cleaning products brand. For a fermentation company, getting an ingredient through a consumer brand's formulation, regulatory and supply requirements once is more informative than any market projection, because it means the molecule performs and the paperwork exists.

The product claims beyond that are functional rather than quantified: stability, mildness, foaming, gelling, emulsification and degreasing, with the surfactants described as biodegradable and non-ecotoxic. Those properties are what formulators buy, and none of them has been published as comparative test data.

The plant is the whole question

When it raised €6 million in April 2024, led by the European Circular Bioeconomy Fund with Qbic III and the Flanders Future Tech Fund, AmphiStar said the money would fund commercial production with partners, research, regulatory work and its own production facility, with a launch plant of 1,000 tonnes a year on a fully active basis, and that it would raise more in 2025 to build it. No completion or construction start has been announced.

That is the pattern in fermentation: titre and productivity are solved in a pilot plant, and the business then stalls on capital for the first commercial facility. The project's answer is co-location, building plants next to the waste producers or collectors that supply the feedstock, which cuts logistics and gives the plant a reason to exist where the waste is. CORDIS shows no periodic report.

1. Industrially relevant fermentationReportedTitres above 200 g/L and productivity above 2 g/L per hour.
2. Product in a consumer brandDone onceWith Ecover in 2023, per the company.
3. 1,000 tonne launch plantNot builtAnnounced as a plan in 2024; no construction reported.
4. 5% of the serviceable marketProjectionDepends on plants that do not exist.

Public money from four directions

The project states more than €12 million raised before this grant, from EU Circular Bio-based Europe projects Waste2Func and SURFs UP, regional grants from Flanders' VLAIO and Germany's disruptive innovation agency SPRIND, and the venture funds ECBF, Qbic and the Flanders Future Tech Fund. The EIC award is blended finance, and no EIC Fund equity has been announced. For a company that needs a factory, the next number that matters is not a grant but project finance.

Palm oil, petroleum and European rules

Surfactants are where two European regulatory pressures meet: deforestation rules that make palm-derived ingredients harder to source, and chemical policy pushing brands toward biodegradable, non-ecotoxic ingredients. A surfactant fermented from local food waste answers both and also shortens a supply chain that currently runs through Southeast Asia. That is why this company has been funded by nearly every European instrument available, from a Flemish regional grant to a German federal agency to the EIC, and why its pilot infrastructure sits at a publicly funded plant in Ghent.