DSM evaluates food & biotech start-up pitches

10 Oct 2017 --- Royal DSM hosted a successful Innovation Partnering Conference in conclusion of the Connecting Bright Innovations 2017 held this year in Delft, The Netherlands. A total of eight promising start-ups were invited to pitch at the event, which focused on new and innovative products and biotechnologies for food, health and biotech applications. A panel of expert venturing and innovation specialists is evaluating the pitches with a view to their suitability for further financing and partnering opportunities. 

Speaking at the opening of the conference, Patrick Niels, President of DSM Food Specialties, emphasized the importance of venturing and open innovation in the modern business world: “At DSM Food Specialties, we aim to enable better food for everyone, helping to make people’s diets healthier, tastier, and more sustainable. Encouraging open innovation like this is an important part of our approach; there are so many great ideas and courageous start-ups out there, and this is one way for us to tap into them, hopefully to the benefit of our customers, our business – and of course for the entrepreneurs themselves.”

Eight finalists
An expert panel from DSM and Nutrition Capital Network evaluated a long list of entrepreneurs and innovators who applied to attend Connecting Bright Innovations 2017, ultimately inviting eight companies to pitch in Delft. The finalists were: 3f Bio (UK), Alderys (France), Biosyntia (Denmark), Chinova Bioworks (Canada), Kiverdi (US), Pectcof (Netherlands), Swiss DeCode (Switzerland) and Zymtronix (US). Chinova Bioworks, for example, are pioneering the use of natural mushroom chitosan as a bio-preservative ingredient.

High standard
Krijn Rietveld, Senior Vice President Partnering for Innovation at DSM, heads the Connecting Bright Innovations 2017 panel: “We were impressed by the high standard of the pitches we heard during the conference, so congratulations to all who took part. It’s inspiring to see such passion, drive and energy. The technologies and business cases on show were very interesting, and I am sure that there are a number of whom we will be able to take our relationship further, to see how DSM can help scale up their promising platforms to realize their full commercial potential.”

Leading location for biotech 
Connecting Bright Innovations 2017 was held at the Rosalind Franklin Biotechnology Center on the DSM site in Delft.

The center’s location at the heart of the Biotech Campus Delft allows DSM to rapidly develop and scale up biotechnology solutions for promising new ingredients for customer validation and commercial roll-out. The Biotech Campus Delft, an initiative of DSM Delft, Delft University of Technology, the City of Delft and the Province of South Holland, builds on the location’s existing competencies and internationally recognized position as a world leader in biotechnology development. It brings together fundamental science and R&D, applications expertise, piloting and scale-up facilities as well commercial and market insights and relationships on one location, being also the global headquarters of DSM Food Specialties.