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Startup in Spotlight: Biomaterial innovator PACT wants to change how we dress, picks £9M funding

PACT senior team (L-R) Zuleyka Strasner (VP of Strategy), Dr Jason Camp (VP of Product Development), Dr Yudi Ding (CEO & Founder), Neils Ramay (COO & Founder), Candice Koo (VP of Growth)
Image credit: PACT

PACT, a Cambridge-based startup that is developing innovative biomaterials, has announced a £9 million seed round investment. The round was joined by Hoxton Ventures, ReGen Ventures, Celsius Industries (formerly UNTITLED) and Polytechnique Ventures. The investment will support PACT as it grows its team and develops its new facilities in Cambridge to scale up production and bring new materials to the market.

TFN asked PACT’s CEO and co-founder, Dr Yudí Ding, about the startup and what their first biomaterial, Oval, means for manufacture and the environment.

The science that inspired PACT’s Oval material

Fashion might not have seemed like the obvious choice for Ding and his co-founder and COO Niels Ramay. Both had backgrounds in science, but the inspiration for Oval, PACT’s first biomaterial, came from Ding’s research into proteins at the University of Cambridge.

“I always had a great interest in design,” Ding said. He had also completed placements at L’Oréal, where he experimented with collagen, a common ingredient in cosmetics, but also the building block of skin and leather. “These personal and professional influences came together to create a passion to innovate in the biomaterials space.”

Ding and Ramay met through Entrepreneur First when Ding was looking for a co-founder. His background in physics and finance made him a good co-founder, but that was not the prime qualification, Ding said, “we have a mutual love of France and French design, and that made him the ideal match.”

Crafting innovative fashion with innovative materials

Founding PACT in 2020, they have developed an entirely natural biomaterial, Oval. Based on collagen, their patented process transforms the raw materials into skins that share many characteristics with traditional materials, including leather. It makes it ideal for use in the creative fashion industry.

PACT has already formed partnerships with several leading Maisons — the leading fashion houses — to explore how the material can be used as a replacement for other traditional materials. Oval’s collagen base means it responds and ages much like leather, and it can simply be dropped into existing manufacturing processes, making adoption by brands simple.

The material also brings significant environmental benefits when compared to traditional materials, especially leather. Replacing just 1% of leather with Oval would reduce CO₂ emissions by 4.8 million tonnes.

“Luxury brands and fashion houses are working hard to ensure their products tread more lightly on the world, whilst also making sure they protect quality and heritage,” Ding said. “Oval has been engineered to give designers climate-positive alternatives that meet their high standards and that can be used alongside traditional materials. At the same time, Oval has also been created so brands can use it to craft completely new aesthetics and finishes — it’s highly versatile.”

The quality of the material also avoids the problems associated with fast fashion. “The team has focused a huge amount on durability,” Ding said. “This means pieces made with Oval are made to last. It has been designed to support the creation of heritage pieces that stand the test of time.”

Dan Fitzgerald, Managing Partner at ReGen Ventures, pointed to the quality of Oval as one of the reasons behind their investment. “We’ve met with plenty of new materials companies but struggled to find any that could actually meet the performance standards of incumbent materials, let alone exceed them. The PACT team have developed a platform that can utilise natural collagen sources to create beautiful materials that have exceeded the strict requirements of the world’s luxury fashion houses,” he said. “What’s more, they have a pathway to produce materials in a genuinely scalable way.”

Shaping the future: PACT’s vision for fashion and more

The seed funding will be used to continue PACT’s work in developing their range, scaling up and industrialising their production, as they expand their reach into the footwear, interiors, and the automotive sectors. They have invested in a 13,820 square foot HQ in Cambridge to house their research and pilot production. They’ve also added to their team to support research and growth, including Candice Koo, who joins PACT as VP of growth after working as a Director at French luxury brand Hermès.

Ding plans for Oval, and other materials developed by PACT, to transform the fashion industry and the objects around us. “Oval is just the beginning,” he said. “The team of scientists and engineers at PACT are working on discovering and perfecting a much wider stable of biomaterial innovations — opening up new possibilities for designers.”

The potential for biomaterials, he suggests, is that a whole set of industries can innovate, but without a heavy environmental cost. “We believe PACT’s materials will become mainstay products,” Ding told us. “It will sit proudly alongside heritage materials — customers will benefit from a wider choice of incredible materials that collectively tread much more lightly on the world’s precious resources.”

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