Our co-founders Thomas Schmidt, CEO, and Per Falholt, CSO, have known each other for long. But when covid hit Denmark and hand sanitizers were nowhere to be found, they took the matter into their own hands. Repurposing unused cider into ethanol, this was the beginning of a joint adventure into the world of sustainable biosolutions. 21st.BIO was born. 

Along their careers, Thomas and Per realized that many companies fail to successfully upscale their innovation out of the lab. They saw an incredible opportunity – and challenge! – in creating a technology platform to leverage advanced production strains for high-volume protein production for nutrition, food, biomaterials or agriculture. 

21st.BIO’s technology has been developed over 40 years through R&D work in Novo Industry, Novo Nordisk and Novozymes (today known as Novonesis). Inheriting this world-class technology base, we continue our legacy by developing and optimizing the production strains for new ingredients purposes. 

In 2021, Novo Holdings committed to invest 86m EUR in our company, against a share of ownership. 

With skill (and a bit of luck) our R&D team quickly unlocked unprecedented titers for several dairy proteins, such as beta-lactoglobulin. Since then, we onboarded several partners in our dairy proteins development programs, who are already scaling and preparing to enter the US market. 

We are proud partners of the frontrunner in biomaterials, German biotech pioneer AMSilk, who develops spider silk-based proteins and turns them into fibers, yarns, or even hydrogels for textile, homecare, biomedical, and automobile industries. 

In May 2024, we unveiled our state-of-the-art pilot plant, built in our Copenhagen headquarters. This facility was designed as a mini factory, to best prepare our customers for industrial production.