- Biotech startup Uncaged is mimicking the characteristics of traditional leather but using plants.
- The US company, founded in 2020, has created a plastic- and animal-free alternative to the material.
- Uncaged just nabbed $2 million from Jaguar Land Rover’s investment arm using this pitch deck.
A startup creating animal- and plastic-free leather just netted $2 million in a pre-seed round that was backed by Jaguar Land Rover’s investment arm InMotion Ventures.
US biotech company Uncaged Innovations, founded in 2020, mimics the characteristics of skin proteins with plants. The quality and performance of traditional leather come from the structure of animal proteins, so Uncaged Innovations has developed a way to combine proteins from grain byproducts with other natural elements to copy this structure.
The New York startup is the brainchild of CEO Stephanie Downs, who has worked on animal rights issues and in startups for over two decades, and CTO Xiaokun Wang, a former Johns Hopkins scientist with experience in materials science and tissue engineering.
Uncaged Innovations combines plant proteins with flower extracts for scent, algae, natural rubbers, and mineral pigments or different agricultural waste streams such as coffee cherry, which is used for color. This allows the company to tweak its material’s texture, strength, flexibility, water resistance, color, and fragrance to serve a specific use case.
It comes off the back of a “perfect storm” of awareness around animal welfare, the environmental impact of leather, and the use of plastics in existing synthetic leather, Downs told Insider.
The company’s pitch deck noted that it takes years to raise an animal before it’s slaughtered for human use and agriculture itself has a huge environmental footprint, including its demand on land and water. Leather has a long and complicated supply chain, it stated, while the hide tanning process requires highly toxic chemicals, Downs added.
Alternatives have long been made of plastic. Newer versions use fruit as a material but they still use plastic, Downs said. Others take advantage of mushrooms but experience challenges around scaling and pricing, she added.
Uncaged Innovations is taking a “two-pronged approach” by serving the fashion and automobile industries. There has been a lot of interest from car makers since Tesla ditched animal leather, Downs said, but cars are developed years in advance so Uncaged Innovations’ go-to-market would be slower if it focused on vehicles alone. Brands, meanwhile, are already setting goals to cut leather use, she added. For example, high street fashion company H&M turned its eye to plant-based materials years ago.
The fresh funding came in multiple tranches and surpassed the company’s initial $1.5 million goal, Downs said. VegInvest, an early backer of Dutch cultivated meat company Mosa Meat; Stray Dog Capital, which invested in Mosa Meat and Beyond Meat; Alwyn Capital, a VC firm focused on replacing animals in supply chains, and others participated in the round. Downs expects to head straight back out to the market for the company’s seed round due to the nature of the slow VC market.
Last month the startup did its first full-scale trial. It will use the cash to keep scaling the technology and team.
Check out the 11-slide pitch deck it used to raise the round: