Beta Bugs' Fly Genetics: What the EIC Accelerator Paid For

The black soldier fly is the workhorse of insect farming: its larvae convert food, farm and industrial waste into protein and oil for pet, fish and livestock feed, as Scottish Financial Review summarised the business. When Beta Bugs applied for its first EU grant in 2019, it argued that "little focus has been put on developing new breeds of high-performance BSF", according to CORDIS. The company, founded in 2017 and based at the Roslin Innovation Centre on the University of Edinburgh's Easter Bush Campus, according to its website, set out to sell genetically improved flies that grow faster and yield more. The European Innovation Council selected its project CHiPInB in the EIC Accelerator pilot's 8 January 2020 cut-off, grant only, and the EU paid €688,229.50 of a €983,185 project, according to CORDIS.

The project ended in December 2022 with the company's statement that its strain, HiPer-Fly, had been "successfully commercialized". Since then Beta Bugs has raised money three times, almost doubled its average headcount and moved into larger production. It has also lost more money every year, its founder left the board in December 2025, and the round it closed in August 2026 priced each share at £0.43, against £2.37 in 2025, according to filings at Companies House.

Where Beta Bugs Stands Now

Beta Bugs is an active company with a new management team. Companies House lists it as active, with its latest accounts, for the year to 31 October 2025, filed in August 2026 and a confirmation statement filed on 6 October 2026, according to its company record. No insolvency notice appears in The Gazette, where the company's entries are routine filing notices and one environmental permit application.

The leadership has changed almost completely in a year. Thomas Farrugia, who founded the company and ran it as chief executive, ceased to be a director on 19 December 2025, and on the same day Scottish Enterprise, a public body of the Scottish Government, was registered as a person with significant control holding more than 25% of the shares, according to the officers register and the register of significant control. Five days later the company bought back and cancelled 562,050 of its own shares for a declared aggregate of £0.56, according to its SH03 return; the company's October 2026 confirmation statement lists the same number of shares against Farrugia's name. No public statement on his departure could be found.

In August 2026 Beta Bugs announced £800,000 of new funding led by TRICAPITAL Angels with Scottish Enterprise, and the appointment of Alan Tinch, who has commercialised genetics in chickens, pigs and salmon, as chief executive. The announcement called his appointment "a strategic shift towards a more focused commercial genetics model", according to the company's announcement. The filing behind it shows 1,895,908 new shares allotted on 4 August 2026 at £0.43 each, or about £815,000, the same day Tinch and a new finance head joined the board, according to the SH01 return. Eighteen months earlier, investors had paid £2.37 per share.

The company also announced a partnership with FreezeM Cryogenetics, whose PauseM technology holds newly hatched larvae in suspension so they can be shipped and stored. A HiPer-Fly breeding population is to be set up at FreezeM's facility in Germany, run with Hermetia Baruth GmbH, with controlled and commercial trials in the second half of 2026 and full commercialisation planned for 2027, according to Beta Bugs and International Pet Food.

The Technology: Breeding a Better Fly

An insect farm's output depends on how fast its larvae grow, how large they get and how much protein they contain. Beta Bugs' approach, as set out in its EIC application, combines its own trait generation methods with quantitative genetics and selective breeding: the same method of measuring animals and breeding from the best that livestock genetics companies use, applied to the fly.

Its tool is PLATYPIS, short for Platform for Typing of Insect Strains: modular rearing units that keep many genetically distinct strains apart, combined with high-throughput phenotyping, the automated measurement of traits such as growth rate, size and protein content, according to the CHiPInB objective. The best strains are crossed and selected into a commercial line. The company says HiPer-Fly is the product of "more than 45 generations of pedigree breeding" aimed at growth, yield, robustness and consistency, according to its 2026 announcement. It sells eggs and young larvae to farms, which grow them out themselves.

The difference it claimed from the alternative is specialisation. Beta Bugs described itself in its EIC application as "the first insect breeding company" for the fly and "the first company focusing solely on genetics and catering to the whole market rather than in-house applications for one producer". How large the yield gain of HiPer-Fly is has not been published in figures. Beta Bugs says independent trials completed in early 2026 showed "superior performance compared with industry benchmarks", according to Food Agribusiness World; the trial data and the trial operator are not public.

What CHiPInB Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

CHiPInB was Beta Bugs' second EU grant. A year earlier the company had received €50,000 from the SME Instrument Phase 1 for PLATYPIS, a five-month feasibility study from May to September 2019, according to CORDIS; its report set the mission of doubling "the fast growing industry's productivity". The European Commission's list of companies selected in the January 2020 EIC Accelerator cut-off names Beta Bugs Limited of Ingatestone, Essex, as a grant-only winner and lists no other beneficiary for the project. The grant agreement was signed on 11 June 2020, and the project ran from 1 July 2020 to 31 December 2022.

The application promised to commercialise the breeding platform, "capture significant market share" and turn the company into "a highly impactful and profitable venture". The final periodic report lists four objectives and claims all four: finished breeding technologies, a validated and costed commercialisation plan, business development and a communications campaign, including a trade magazine for the industry, Beta Buzz. It says Beta Bugs set up a scaled breeding facility at Easter Bush and "a dedicated egg production operation, a first within the UK", grew from 4 to 14 staff and expected to double its headcount again within three years. An environmental permit application to the Scottish Environment Protection Agency for manufacturing black soldier fly larvae at a site in Loanhead, Midlothian, published in The Gazette in March 2022, backs the production claim.

1. Scaled breeding platform (PLATYPIS)DeliveredFacility at Easter Bush per CORDIS; breeding programme continued since.
2. Egg production at commercial scaleDeliveredUK egg production site per CORDIS; SEPA permit application for Loanhead, 2022.
3. HiPer-Fly commercialisedDisputedCORDIS says commercialised by December 2022; a 2026 trade report says first commercial sales are expected in early 2027.
4. Significant market share, profitable ventureNot achievedLosses rose each year to £1.41M in 2025; no customer or market share published.
5. Headcount to double within three yearsNot achievedFrom 14 at project end to 21 on average in the year to October 2025.

The project delivered what a grant can buy: a breeding platform, a production operation and a larger team, on the planned schedule as far as CORDIS shows. What it was meant to lead to, a profitable genetics supplier with a meaningful share of the market, has not happened. The sources also disagree on when HiPer-Fly reached the market. CORDIS reports revenue from the "commercialized product" by the end of 2022, and in October 2023 Farrugia said Beta Bugs had supplied its products "to an increasing number of established and new entrant insect farmers in the UK and international markets", according to The Fish Site. In August 2026, Food Agribusiness World reported that the new funding would support milestones "ahead of the first commercial sales of its HiPer-Fly product, expected in early 2027". The company's own announcement does not use that phrase. No customer of Beta Bugs has been named publicly.

The Money Since the Grant

Beta Bugs has financed itself through three equity rounds after the project. In October 2023 it announced £1.72 million led by the TRICAPITAL Syndicate with SIS Ventures, Scottish Enterprise, Beeches Group, Climate.vc, existing shareholders and Innovate UK, when it had 12 employees, according to Scottish Financial News and The Fish Site; Silicon Canals reported the same round as €1.46 million. Farrugia said then that the money would "drive to profitability over the coming 18-24 months". The 2023 accounts record 686,275 new shares at £1.53, about £1.05 million; how the rest of the announced total was made up is not broken down. In March 2025 TRICAPITAL Angels and Scottish Enterprise led a £2.1 million round, according to Scottish Financial Review and Scottish Financial News, and the 2025 accounts show 871,370 shares issued at £2.37, or £2,065,146.90.

The profitability target was missed. The loss for the year to October 2025, the end of the 18 to 24 months, was £1,412,958, the largest in the company's history, against £758,609 a year earlier, according to the 2025 accounts. The company does not file a profit and loss account, so its turnover is not public; trade debtors were £4,459 at the year end. The same accounts record a £125,163 impairment of plant and machinery, net assets of £519,998 after the 2025 round, and £541,422 of secured non-bank loans. The only registered charge, created in December 2022, is held by Innovate UK Loans Limited, according to the charges register. The directors' going concern note relies on grant income "agreed in principle" and the £800,000 equity agreed after the year end.

The headcount grew more slowly than CORDIS anticipated. Average staff were 11 in the year to October 2021, 13 in 2022 and 2023, 15 in 2024 and 21 in 2025, according to the accounts filed at Companies House. The company's website lists 19 people as of 2025, according to its about page, and an EIT success story describes support from the EIT Food Accelerator Network and its Alternative Proteins Challenge.

The EIC Fund

CHiPInB was a grant-only award, so no EIC equity was part of it. Beta Bugs does not appear among the 326 organisations listed across the 17 pages of the EIC Fund portfolio, checked in October 2026. Its outside equity has come mainly from the TRICAPITAL angel syndicate, Scottish Enterprise and impact investors such as SIS Ventures.

Why Europe Should Care

Insect protein is one of the few feed ingredients that Europe can produce from its own waste rather than import as soy or fishmeal, the argument Beta Bugs made in its EIC application, which called the sector "of strategic importance to the EU's future food security". The EU allowed insect protein in fish feed in July 2017 and, with Commission Regulation (EU) 2021/1372, in pig and poultry feed from September 2021, according to The Poultry Site and the EAAP insect commission. Better genetics would lower the cost of every tonne of that protein. The EU funded a British company to work on it, and the planned production of HiPer-Fly with FreezeM in Germany is the route the company has named into the EU market.

The Verdict

Beta Bugs has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.