LIVIN farms is an insect technology scale-up that designs and builds highly automated insect-farming factories. The Austrian company supplies specially prepared neonate larvae, enabling customers to turn organic by-products into high-value feedstock.

With manufacturing sites in Austria and Germany, its technology is already transforming around 100 000 tonnes of organic waste each year and pioneering monumental changes within the agri and food tech sector.

We spoke with Katharina Unger, founder and CEO of LIVIN farms, to explore why the company focuses on building technology rather than trading end products and what it has taken to introduce insect farming in Europe.

From prototype ideation to industrial solution

Katharina first identified the gap in the market in 2013, while working and living in Hong Kong as a product developer. The city offered an incredible abundance of food culture, yet the surrounding industrial regions were dense and the oceans were depleted. “That tension inspired me to look deeper into how our food systems actually work,” she explains.

Katharina set herself the goal of finding a way to produce protein with the smallest possible environmental footprint and she came across insects in her research. Although consumed by animals and humans for thousands of years, they had never been industrialised.

She built the first ready-to-use insect farming module in 2014 and began working on the first industrial black soldier fly larvae project after having found investors in Shenzhen, China. The company initially offered small-scale insect-farming devices to local homes, schools, and labs, but, as regulation in Europe was slowly evolving, it became clear that a new market was about to emerge.

“We saw that our technology could be applied at industrial scale, and that’s when our team decided to return to Europe and scale our original designs to truly industrial dimensions.”

Feeding the world while saving the planet

The company operates in two directions: offering semi- or fully automated insect-farming factories, and providing young larvae to customers. Katharina often compares the model to piglet farming: “We build the ‘stable’ and we sell the ‘piglets’ – except our piglets are much smaller and grow much faster,” she says with a smile.

There are many benefits to using insect feed as a source of protein. Aside from animals growing up healthier, farmers have also reported harder-to-measure effects such as higher vitality. Beyond these softer aspects, there are also many economic benefits.

“The company’s mission is to feed the world while saving the planet, and our way of enabling that is by enabling operators to produce insect protein locally and at scale.”

LIVIN farms have a strong biology team with experience in insect production and genetics, and this combination of biology and technology is one of the reasons they chose not to focus on producing and trading the final product themselves. Instead, they build the technologies that enable operators to produce those end products directly — and get started quickly and reliably.

Pioneering a whole industry with success

In the early days, the biggest challenge was entering the European market. “There was no insect protein industry, no regulation, no established market — just an idea that this could be a great solution,” explains Katharina. Launching a product into a market with clear regulations was inherently risky because commercial success was not guaranteed.

For a long time, the company faced rejection and skepticism because there is a general lack of knowledge when it comes to insect farming, with some suppliers even refusing to collaborate. However, all struggles fade to nothing when compared to the most rewarding moments — especially internal ones.

“When the team faces a really difficult project or problem and we work through every possible solution until we find the one that works — that is incredibly satisfying and shows that together we can solve anything.”

Looking ahead, the big plan for LIVIN farms is to continue building the biofactory network across Europe. Currently, the company is working on its Series B fundraising with the help of the EIC Scaling Club. Katherina concludes:

“We are not just focused on individual factories or hardware solutions — we are focused on growing an entirely new market.”

About the EIC Scaling Club

The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120+ European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.

The top 120+ European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.

The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.

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