Alkelux chiude un round Seed da 970 mila euro portando in Italia il primo additivo industriale per imballaggi alimentari ottenuto dagli scarti della liquirizia
The investment will fund the construction of the pilot plant in Sassari, which will increase production from the current 10 kg to over 4 tonnes of additive per year, as well as securing the necessary marketing certifications and expanding the team. The aim? To make inroads into the global market for active packaging.
Alkelux, a deep-tech start-up based in Sassari that specialises in the development of sustainable materials for food packaging, has announced that it has closed a seed funding round worth €970,000. The round comprises approximately €800,000 in new capital and the conversion of previous SAFE instruments worth €170,000.
The transaction involves Foodtech Accelerator, an investment vehicle established by CDP Venture Capital and Eatable Adventures, alongside Accelera Ventures as part of the second cohort of FoodSeed, the acceleration programme run by CDP Venture Capital’s national network, which have made a follow-on investment of €350,000, bringing the total investment to €520,000, Banco di Sardegna, which has taken a direct equity stake through its Spoke4Fin Fund, and La Gemma Venture, an accelerator and investment fund based in Cuneo.
The funds raised will be allocated primarily to the construction of the pilot plant in Sassari, which is due to be completed between September and October 2026 and is expected to represent a significant leap in production: from the current 10 kg per year produced on a laboratory scale to a full-scale capacity of 4.5 tonnes of additive per year. In addition, part of the funding round will be dedicated to obtaining the necessary marketing authorisations, expected by the end of 2026, and to expanding the team, which has already been strengthened by the recruitment of the first two employees, including a researcher who has returned to Italy after six years in Slovenia as part of the ‘brain gain’ initiative.
Founded in 2024 by Matteo Poddighe (pictured), a chemist and PhD graduate from the University of Sassari, together with Davide Sanna and two other partners, Emina Bilanovic and Carlo Usai, Alkelux was founded with the ambitious and innovative mission of reducing food waste throughout the fruit and vegetable supply chain by transforming an industrial by-product currently considered worthless – namely, the root hairs of liquorice, produced in hundreds of tonnes each year by the Calabrian supply chain – into an industrial additive for active packaging.
At the heart of the technology are nano-polymer dots – carbon-based nanoparticles with antimicrobial properties – which are incorporated directly into plastics or cellulose pulp during production, without requiring any modifications to the equipment already in use by packaging companies. Tests conducted in in-house laboratories and certified by third-party bodies have shown that the additive extends the shelf life of strawberries by up to three times, from 3 to 8–9 days, with similar effects on other small, highly perishable fruits such as blueberries. In terms of yield, one gram of powder is sufficient to treat one kilogram of plastic, with a dosage of 0.1% making the technology competitive even compared to multinational solutions currently on the market.
To date, Alkelux has already secured Proof of Concept contracts with two global players in the packaging sector and is in commercial discussions in Mexico, Chile and Thailand. In terms of raw materials, the start-up is working with two Italian liquorice processing companies, Liquirgam and Naturmed, to recover waste from the production chain.
Between late 2026 and early 2027, Alkelux aims to launch a Series A funding round of at least €3 million, with the aim of building a fully-fledged industrial plant in Calabria, at the heart of the liquorice supply chain, in order to achieve global-scale production by early 2028. At the same time, the team is working on extending the additive to other sectors, from meat packaging and bakery products to single-use devices in the biomedical sector – a segment with a very high environmental impact but one where sustainable chemical solutions are still under-represented.
“This funding round is not only an economic boost but also a sign that investors believe in a deep-tech model that originates in the south and makes use of waste materials, people and skills that are currently at risk of going to waste. Over the coming months, we will scale Alkelux up from laboratory to industrial scale, which is essential for finalising contracts with companies that have been waiting for months to test the additive on a significant scale.” “Our ambition is to build an infrastructure that starts in Sardinia, makes use of waste from Calabria and creates skilled jobs for those who have studied in these regions and are now very often forced to leave,” says Poddighe, the startup’s CEO.
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