Bioplastics company wraps up $24 million Series A

Husband-and-wife sustainable packaging company Great Wrap has held a $24 million Series A round ahead of the launch of its commercial bioplastics business.

The Australian Financial Review reported over the weekend that the raise included $11 million from investors such as Thomas Food International’s Darren Thomas and Woolworths’ venture arm W23, as well as $13 million in asset finance from DLL Group, Rabobank’s asset financing division.

The new funding follows a $3 million seed round last year and will allow Great Wrap to begin processing potato waste into the compostable bioplastic PHA for stretch wraps at its Tullamarine site.

“There’s only a few biorefineries of this kind around the world and very few of the scale that we’re going to,” Jordy Kay told the paper. 

“Once fully commissioned it will be the biggest PHA biorefinery in the southern hemisphere.”

“We now have the capacity to manufacture all of Australia’s stretch wrap, thanks to our impact-aligned investors,” said Julia Kay

The company estimates 50,000 tonnes per annum of potato waste will be converted into stretch wrap at the site, which will hire another 100 staff. It operates another Victorian site on the Mornington Peninsula..

The process was developed via a CRC-P project with Monash University, with its scaling up assisted through an Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre Commercialisation Fund grant. 

Great Wrap was launched during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 by Jordy and Julia Kay, a winemaker and an architect respectively. Their first product was a compostable cling wrap. 

Julia Kay said it would launch a commercial product in two months, a pallet wrap, with thousands of customers expressing interest.

The company aims to address the 150,000 tonnes of cling, silage and pallet wrap that go into Australian landfills each year.

Picture: Great Wrap

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