Swiss startup Seprify raises €13.4M to replace titanium dioxide with cellulose

Swiss startup Seprify has raised €13.4 million to scale a cellulose-based alternative to one of the most widely used, and increasingly banned, industrial whiteners on the planet. IKEA is backing it.

Somewhere in Southeast Asia, a small beetle called Cyphochilus produces the whitest surface found in nature, not through pigment, but through the microscopic structure of its scales, which scatter light so efficiently that the result is a near-perfect white. For Lukas Schertel, then a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge’s Bioinspired Photonics Lab, it was an engineering blueprint.

The question Schertel and his co-founder Oliver Polcher started with was deceptively simple: if a beetle can achieve optical whiteness through cellulose microstructure alone, why do food and cosmetics manufacturers still depend on titanium dioxide?

The answer, until recently, was that they didn’t have a viable alternative. Seprify, previously known as Impossible Materials and ...