On 1 September 2026 Protein Production Technology International reported that Belgian precision fermentation company Paleo had secured additional funding led by Beyond Impact VC, and that CEO and co-founder Hermes Sanctorum had disclosed a 613-fold reduction in myoglobin production costs over the past two years.
Six hundred and thirteen. Three significant figures. It is the most precise number Paleo has put into the public record about its manufacturing economics, and it is a ratio to a quantity the company has never published.
The report is careful about this, and says so directly: “Paleo has not disclosed further details on the resulting production cost, fermentation volumes or other scale-up metrics.” The size of the round was not announced either. The disclosure route was a LinkedIn post.
This is not an accusation of bad faith. Paleo has a real ingredient, real trial partners and a genuine technical claim. It is an observation about what an operator can and cannot do with the figure as published — and about a pattern this publication has now documented four times in four different companies.
What is actually on the record
| Item | Disclosed | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Cost reduction multiple | 613-fold, over two years | Sanctorum, LinkedIn, reported 1 Sep 2026 |
| Starting cost per kg | Not disclosed | — |
| Resulting cost per kg | Not disclosed | — |
| Round size | Not announced | — |
| Lead investor | Beyond Impact VC, an existing investor | Reported 1 Sep 2026 |
| Round type | Not stated | — |
| Fermentation volumes | Not disclosed | — |
| “Production at large scale” | Claimed, undefined | Sanctorum, reported 1 Sep 2026 |
| Inclusion rate in finished product | Under 1% by weight | Paleo, via PPTI |
| Format | Moved from liquid to powder | Paleo CBO Pierre Donck, via PPTI |
| Prior disclosed raise | EUR 12 million, 2023 | Paleo |
| Restructuring | Announced 22 October 2025 | The Plant Base |
The 2023 round is the last quantified financing on the record: EUR 12 million from a syndicate including DSM Venturing, Planet A Ventures, Gimv, SFPIM Relaunch, Beyond Impact and Siddhi Capital. In October 2025 the company announced a “strategic refocus” centred on core R&D, with what it called a significant staff reduction at its Leuven site. Sanctorum’s framing then: “the current market and funding environment require us to prioritise: maintaining our core R&D.”
The September 2026 disclosure is therefore the first funding news in eleven months, and it arrives with a technical achievement attached and no financial quantum.
Practical consequence: an undisclosed round led by an existing investor eleven months after a restructuring is a specific kind of event, and it is not the same as a new lead at a marked-up valuation. Neither is it a failure. If you are tracking this company, the question to ask is whether any new investor participated, not how large the multiple is.
Why a 613x cost reduction tells you almost nothing
A multiple is a ratio. Without one of its two terms, it constrains nothing.
Work it in both directions. If Paleo’s starting point was a laboratory-scale cost of $100,000/kg — an entirely ordinary figure for a purified recombinant protein produced in shake flasks and purified by column chromatography at gram scale — then a 613-fold reduction lands at about $163/kg. If the starting point was $6,130/kg, the endpoint is $10/kg. If it was $613,000/kg, the endpoint is $1,000/kg. All three are consistent with the disclosure. They imply completely different businesses.
The direction of the ambiguity is not neutral, either. Large multiples are easiest to achieve from high bases, because the first order of magnitude in any bioprocess scale-up is nearly always the cheapest: moving off shake flasks, off analytical-grade media, off manual purification. A 613x reduction is more consistent with a journey that began at laboratory cost than one that began at pilot cost. That is a normal and creditable engineering achievement. It is simply not the same claim as approaching a commercially relevant price.
There is one genuine mitigating factor, and it deserves weight. Paleo states myoglobin is used at under 1% of the finished product by weight, and explicitly positions this as an economic advantage over functional proteins that must be included at much higher rates. At a 0.5% inclusion rate, an ingredient at $163/kg contributes roughly $0.82 per kg of finished product; at $10/kg it contributes about $0.05. Against plant-based meat retailing well above $10/kg, the first figure is a real but survivable cost line and the second is a rounding error. So the inclusion rate genuinely does widen the band of acceptable ingredient costs — which is exactly why the missing endpoint matters. Cost-in-use is calculable the moment either term is published, and not before.
Practical consequence: when a supplier gives you a cost-reduction multiple, ask for cost-in-use at your inclusion rate, in currency, per kilogram of your finished product. That single question converts an unfalsifiable ratio into a line item you can put in a costing sheet, and a supplier who has genuinely reached a commercial cost has no reason to refuse it.
The pattern: this is the fourth time
Set the Paleo disclosure beside three others this publication has examined, and a practice comes into view.
| Company | Figure published | Base published | Where we found the base, if anywhere |
|---|---|---|---|
| The EVERY Company | “Quadruples” capacity, 4x | No | 63,000 litres, in a trade interview, not the release |
| Paleo | 613-fold cost reduction | No | Nowhere |
| Vendor-sourced China capex claims | Cost per litre of installed capacity | No | A vendor rule of thumb and a six-tonne tank |
| Transferrin media cost | “95% of media cost” | No | The citation trail broke; the real figure is near 1% |
Each case is analysed in full — the EVERY multiple in a 4x on 63,000 litres inside a 9-million-litre pharma estate, the capex heuristic in China’s cheap-capacity claim rests on a vendor rule of thumb and a six-tonne tank, and the transferrin figure in Transferrin is about 1% of media cost, not 95%.
The common structure is a ratio published without its denominator. It is not lying. It is frequently a genuine achievement described in the only terms a company is contractually or competitively willing to use. But it produces a literature in which the sector’s progress cannot be aggregated, compared across companies, or checked against the modelled cost curves — the problem we set out in four public cost models exist for precision-fermented protein, and none sit where the industry does.
Believer Meats is the reason this matters rather than an abstraction. That company raised $390 million, cleared FDA and USDA, and shut down anyway, as we documented in its post-mortem. Approval was not the binding constraint. Cost was. An industry that reports cost improvement as unanchored multiples cannot tell, from the outside, which of its members are approaching the constraint that actually kills companies.
The counter-argument, stated properly
There are three respectable reasons a company withholds the base, and they are not excuses.
Competitive. Publishing your cost per kilogram publishes your yield, your titre and your downstream efficiency to every competitor and every customer’s procurement team. For a pre-revenue company negotiating its first supply agreements, that is a real commercial harm, and the multiple is a way of signalling progress without conceding the negotiating position.
Contractual. Companies working with co-manufacturers are frequently barred from disclosing process economics that would reveal the partner’s tolling rates.
Genuine uncertainty. A cost per kilogram at demonstration scale is not a cost per kilogram at commercial scale, and a company that publishes the first will be held to it as though it were the second. Some of the sector’s worst reporting comes from firms that published a number prematurely and then had to defend it.
All three are legitimate. None of them requires three significant figures. A company that cannot say what it costs can say “over two orders of magnitude” — which is what 613x is, plus a precision the underlying data almost certainly does not support. The specificity is the part that does not follow from the reticence, and it is the part that makes the figure travel further than it should. It will now be repeated as though it were measured.
What we could not establish
- The size of the new round. Not announced. We found no filing or registry entry disclosing it.
- The round’s structure. Whether equity, convertible, bridge or grant-matched is not stated. Whether any new investor participated alongside Beyond Impact VC is not stated.
- The starting or ending cost. Neither is published anywhere we could find.
- What “large scale” means at Paleo. No fermenter volume, batch size or annual output figure is on the record. We could not establish whether production is at Paleo’s own site or a contract manufacturer’s.
- The two-year window. “Over the past two years” is not dated to specific months. If it runs from mid-2024, it spans the restructuring; if from a different point, it may not.
- Any regulatory filing. Sanctorum says the money will “advance our regulatory submissions”, and has previously identified North America and Southeast Asia as clearer pathways than Europe. We searched for a corresponding entry — an EFSA novel food application, a filed FDA GRAS notice, a Singapore Food Agency approval — and found none on the public record. That is not evidence none exists: self-affirmed GRAS determinations are not published, and dossiers under preparation appear nowhere. But no filing is publicly visible today.
- The primary source. The disclosure was made in a LinkedIn post by Sanctorum. We have relied on PPTI’s report of it, which quotes him directly, rather than on the post.
What to watch
Whether a cost per kilogram is ever published. The regulatory submissions Paleo says it is funding will, in most jurisdictions, require intended use levels and a described manufacturing process. Dossiers are not price lists, but a filed novel food application in the EU or a GRAS notice in the US puts specification and process detail on a public docket, and both are more informative than a multiple. A filing appearing in a public register is the single most checkable next event for this company.
Whether the 613x figure is repeated without qualification. It has already begun propagating. If it appears in market reports and investor decks over the coming months as “Paleo reduced production costs 613-fold”, stated without the missing base, then the sector will have absorbed a number that constrains nothing as though it were evidence — the same route by which the transferrin figure travelled for years before anyone checked the citation.
Whether a new investor is named. Existing-investor-led rounds of undisclosed size are a recognisable pattern in this sector at this point in the cycle. If Paleo’s next announcement names a new lead and a figure, the interpretation of this one changes materially.