Gelatex pivoted from leather-like textiles to scaffolds for cultured meat (interview)

Gelatex, based in Tallinn, manufactures 3D nanofibrous scaffolds for cell culture, tissue engineering and cultured meat

That its HaloSpin nanofibre process could win in cell culture and tissue engineering, where scalable production was needed, rather than in textiles

In an interview with TNW, co-founder Mari-Ann Meigo Fonseca said she came from the textile and garment industry and met co-founder Märt-Erik Martens, a materials scientist, while studying at the University of Tartu in 2015. In 2016 they won the ClimateLaunchpad competition with a leather-like textile made from gelatin nanofibres and founded Gelatex.

Because existing production technologies made the textile too costly at scale, Martens developed HaloSpin in 2017, a method that draws nanofibres from liquid polymer solutions without electrostatic forces. Gelatex says it can raise capacity 100 times and cut costs up to 90%. Its pilot machine makes 2.2 kg an hour, versus about 360 grams an hour for the biggest industrial electrospinning unit, and a 5 kg an hour machine is being built. Early interest never became sales. In 2020 the company used the technology to mass-produce nanofibre filter material for face masks, then moved away from textiles into scaffolds for cultured meat, 3D cell culture and tissue engineering.

Existing production technologies made the gelatin textile too expensive to manufacture at scale.

Solving that problem produced HaloSpin, a production method rather than a textile product.

Textile product-market fit with international companies never reached actual sales.

The 2020 face-mask filter work showed founders the demand for scalable nanofibres in cell culture.

Cultured meat faces regulatory challenges and heavy capital needs, so the medical sector comes first.

A technology built to fix a manufacturing bottleneck can turn out more valuable in a different market: Gelatex's textile production problem became a scalable scaffold product.

As of the 2024-09-03 TNW interview, Gelatex was building a 5 kg per hour machine, up from a 2.2 kg per hour pilot machine. It planned to focus on medical applications for five years while treating cultured meat as the biggest long-term market.