Following the EIC Accelerator Money at Livin Farms: Worms to Flies

Livin Farms AgriFood GmbH, a Vienna company that started out selling mealworm farms for kitchens and classrooms, was one of two Austrian winners of the EIC Accelerator pilot's Green Deal round on 19 May 2020. The European Commission's list of selected companies names it once, with no partner company, for Hive Pro: "a highly scalable insect farming concept consisting of an insect fattening plant together with the supply of baby larvae, combined with a service model", funded as a grant only. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,500,000 towards a total cost of €3,625,000, from 1 January 2021 to 31 December 2022. Trade press reported the €2.5 million grant at the time and described a pilot plant for industrial mealworm rearing, according to Trending Topics and the Austrian research agency FFG.

Six years on, the company is active and growing, but its industrial product is not the one in the grant. Its factories now rear black soldier fly larvae, not mealworms, and the first customer plant confirmed by an independent source is on a pig farm in Bavaria, not at a feed mill.

Where Livin Farms Stands Now

The Austrian company register lists Livin Farms AgriFood GmbH as registered, with Katharina Unger as sole managing director, share capital of €67,291.71 and annual accounts filed every year, most recently on 7 October 2025 for 2024, according to the official publication platform evi.gv.at. No insolvency entry appears there. North Data shows the same filings plus two patent publications in March 2026 (a fly cage module with a conveyor belt and packaging for pre-dosed insect breeding units) and €540,748 in state aid from the FFG published in February 2026. Revenue, profit and equity sit behind North Data's paywall, and the accounts of a small Austrian GmbH are abridged, so the company's finances could not be verified.

In an interview published on 11 June 2026, the EIC Scaling Club described Livin Farms as having manufacturing sites in Austria and Germany and said the company "is working on its Series B fundraising with the help of the EIC Scaling Club". On 23 September 2026 the company published a tour of an automated black soldier fly rearing facility in Germany on its own blog.

The Technology: Factories in Modules, Larvae by Post

Insect larvae can turn food waste and agricultural by-products into protein, fat and fertiliser. The difficulty for new producers, the Hive Pro proposal argued, was the "high infrastructure cost, lack of know-how and a sound business case". Livin Farms' answer was to split the business like piglet farming. Customers build and run the fattening plant; Livin Farms supplies the factory modules, the young larvae and the know-how. "We build the 'stable' and we sell the 'piglets'", Unger told the EIC Scaling Club.

In the version described on its website, robots mix the feed and dose it into trays, an automated system adds one pack of one-day-old larvae (Seedlings™) per tray, and automated guided vehicles move the trays between rearing rooms. The cycle from Seedlings™ to finished larvae takes about 11 days, the same figure Unger gave TechCrunch in 2022. The difference from established insect producers such as large single-site plants is the model: decentralised factories at the place where the waste arises, with breeding kept centrally at Livin Farms. The company's patent filings cover a modular breeding system (published 2021) and pre-dosed breeding units (2023), according to North Data.

What the EIC Award Promised, and What the Record Shows

The proposal summarised on CORDIS aimed at feed mills, "where feed is essentially free and the necessary infrastructure already available". It claimed "a strategic partnership with Europe's largest retailer LIDL", a first pilot customer in "an Austrian feed mill" and 175 potential customers in the EU, worth "€770 million for our business for bakery waste alone". The final periodic report, for 2022, names the species: "Tenebrio molitor, commonly referred to as 'mealworm'". It lists three pillars: plug-and-play protein factories, monthly deliveries of baby larvae from a central nursery, and a "Factory as a Service" package of training, remote monitoring and maintenance.

The report's list of work done is short and partly hedged. It records finding a first beta customer willing to build the first full-scale demonstrator, but only the "Partial Construction of a full scale demonstrator of the HP Protein Factory on the test site". It also records a scaled-up reproduction process "to supply up to ten factories" and an on-site nursery. CORDIS publishes no deliverables, papers or result pages for the project. The project ran its planned two years, so it ended on time, but the full-scale demonstrator was not finished within it.

By the time the project ended, the industrial system had changed species. In September 2022, three months before the end date, TechCrunch described Hive Pro as a modular system "for automating the rearing and processing of black soldier flies", and AgNavigator reported the same, with active projects in Turkey, Spain and Germany. The final CORDIS report still describes a mealworm system. Neither the report nor the company explains the switch, and no source names the Austrian feed mill or shows a factory there. Nothing beyond the CORDIS summary was found on the Lidl partnership.

1. Full-scale demonstrator of the protein factoryPartly"Partial construction" by end of 2022, per the CORDIS report; a 1,400 m² demonstration unit near Vienna airport was running in 2022, per AgNavigator.
2. Mealworm factories at feed mills, first pilot at an Austrian feed millNot achievedNo feed-mill factory announced by the company or a third party; the system now uses black soldier flies.
3. Central nursery supplying baby larvae to customersDeliveredWeekly Seedlings™ deliveries of one-day-old fly larvae, used at a German customer plant, per the company.
4. Factory as a Service: training, remote monitoring, maintenanceDeliveredRemotely monitored modules and bio-feasibility studies described by AgNavigator in 2022.
5. Commercial factories with paying customersPartlyOne customer plant confirmed independently by top agrar; the company's claim of more than 10 projects is not itemised.

What It Has Achieved Since

The €6 million Series A in September 2022 was co-led by the investor Peter Lürßen and the hardware accelerator HAX, according to AIN, citing Sifted, and SOSV, a registered shareholder, which gave the round as $5.8 million. The company register shows Lürßen as a shareholder from 22 March 2022, and a capital increase on the same date, according to evi.gv.at. Earlier money is described differently: TechCrunch gives a $3.8 million seed round, while AgNavigator puts seed funding, grants and subsidies from the FFG, AWS and the EIC together at "over €4m".

The clearest independent evidence of a customer is in Bavaria. In October 2025 the German farm journal top agrar reported that pig farmer Manfred Aue in Fürstenzell had built a 60 by 25 metre hall for a larvae plant "worth several million euros", designed for about 1,000 tonnes of larvae a year, with Livin Farms AgriFood GmbH supplying the automation technology and software; production was due to start by the end of 2025. Pig Progress gave the same capacity and a planned start in early 2026. Livin Farms' case studies describe a German pig producer's plant of about 1,000 tonnes of fresh larvae a year, fed live to piglets, and two further plants in Southwestern and Eastern Europe designed for 780 and 260 tonnes of protein powder a year; those two are not named and could not be verified.

The company is also one of three partners in OLIFECycle, a LIFE project coordinated by Dapibus in Barcelona to feed olive pomace to black soldier fly larvae, with an EU contribution of €4,411,453 towards €7,352,422, according to the LIFE project database and the company's announcement. North Data lists Livin Farms' share as €303,989. The original education business continues: The Hive Explorer by Livin Farms still sells mealworm kits for schools.

From Kitchen Farms to Industry

Unger founded Livin Farms in Hong Kong in 2015 with money from a South Chinese investor, kept the headquarters there and opened a Vienna branch in 2019, according to Innovation Origins; the FFG says the company moved its focus from Hong Kong back to Austria in 2019. The dates disagree slightly with the register: the Austrian GmbH was registered on 22 March 2018, according to evi.gv.at, and the company's about page dates Unger's work on converting by-products into insect protein to 2012. In August 2020 the mealworm pilot plant in Vienna's 23rd district covered 200 m² and was fed bread and bakery waste from a large food chain, according to Trending Topics.

The company moved its registered address in April 2021 to an industrial hall in Simmering, according to North Data; by March 2025 it employed 25 people there, up from a founding team of three, and had received support from the Vienna Business Agency in 2017, 2020 and 2024, according to the agency. AgNavigator had reported 20 employees in September 2022.

Why Europe Should Care

The Hive Pro proposal rested on Europe's dependence on imported protein: CORDIS quotes the company as saying the EU imports 74% of the high-protein feed used for fish and poultry. Insect protein's market in Europe depends on feed law. The EU had banned processed animal protein in livestock feed after the BSE crisis, and in 2021 the European Commission moved to allow insect protein in feed for pigs and poultry, as reported by the UK Human Rights Blog in June 2021. That change opened the pig and poultry market that Livin Farms' Bavarian customer now serves, although the farm feeds the larvae live, which the company presents as one of several uses on its blog.

Turning waste into feed close to where it arises also fits the EU's food waste and circular economy goals, which the CORDIS report cites as a driver for its customers. Whether decentralised insect factories can beat large central plants on cost has not been shown in any public figures from Livin Farms or its customers.

The Verdict

Livin Farms and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.