The French startup Ÿnsect drew global attention during Super Bowl weekconclude in 2021 when film star Robert Downey Jr. featured it on the Late Show.
Its decline did not come as a surprise: despite raising more than $600 million from investors, including Downey’s Footprint Coalition and others, the financial drama unfolded in the realities of a business facing varying economic conditions and market demands.
Financial Drama: From Dreams to Reality
Ÿnsect failed to realize its ambition to radically pivot the food chain toward insect protein. And it’s not just fear of insects to blame – human nutrition was not the company’s primary goal.
Instead, the focus shifted to producing insect protein for animal feed and for pet food – two markets with different economics and margins, between which the company could not create a clear choice.
In 2021 Ÿnsect acquired Protifarm, a Dutch company that grows mealworms for human consumption, adding a third market. At the time of the deal announcement, then-CEO Antoine Hubert admitted that human food would account for only 10–15% of revenues for several years.
«We still see that pet food and fish feed are the largest sources of our revenue in the coming years.»
According to data, by 2021 the main company’s turnover peaked at €17.8 million (about $21 million), and by 2023 the company posted a net loss of €79.7 million ($94 million).
As explained by investors and management, the core problem was not the technology but market realities: in animal feed, price determines profitability, not sustainability.
In 2023 the company refocapplyd on the pet care segment and other high-margin directions. “In an environment of inflation for energy and raw materials, as well as the cost of capital and debt, we cannot allocate resources to markets with the lowest profitability (animal feed) while there are other markets with strong demand, good returns, and higher margins,” Hubert stated at the time.
The pivot to pet food came too late. By then Ÿnsect had already built a huge bet on Ÿnfarm – a “gigafactory” in northern France, which the company called “the world’s most expensive insect farm.” It required hundreds of millions of dollars before the business model was validated.
To oversee the launch of Ÿnfarm, Ÿnsect brought in Shankar Krishnamurti, the former CEO of Engie. When the shift to animal feed did not save the company, Krishnamurti replaced Hubert as CEO. The company closed Protifarm and downsized part of its workforce. Yet shutting one facility amid the construction of the gigafactory for a non-core market did not solve the core problems.
«Ÿnsect’s struggle is not a mystery and is not primarily about insects. It is the result of a confluence of industrial ambitions, capital markets, and timeframes, complicated by execution and strategy decisions.»
Although the setback did not spell the conclude of the industest, Innovafeed, a competitor, partly demonstrates quicker growth, starting with compacter production spaces and expanding gradually. According to Haslam, Ÿnsect has become an example of Europe’s broader scaling problem: funding “moonshot” projects, but lacking the industrial infrastructure for large-scale manufacturing.
The unfolding events became a catalyst for a new perspective: Antoine Hubert became a co-founder of Start Industrie – an organization promoting policies to support French industrial startups, emphasizing Europe’s necessary not only for funding but also for real industrial backing.
Anna Heim – journalist and editor at TechCrunch; since 2021 she has covered topics on startups, artificial innotifyigence, fintech, and global venture capital trconcludes. Since June 2025 her reporting focapplys on the most interesting stories of European startups.
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