Synthetic biology company "NewPro" has raised several million dollars in a seed round, with Linear Capital as the sole investor.

Source: 36Kr

Author: Hu Xiangyun

Synthetic biology company NewPro recently closed a multi-million-dollar seed round. Linear Capital was the sole investor, with Mingde Capital serving as the exclusive financial advisor. The proceeds will primarily fund team building, R&D iteration, pilot-scale production of core products such as lactoferrin, and regulatory filings for novel food ingredients.

While capital markets remain chilly this year, state-backed funds — led by state-owned enterprise vehicles — along with local government-guided funds dedicated to synthetic biology are accelerating their deployment into bio-manufacturing. "Bio-manufacturing" has become a key industrial module of "new quality productive forces," and regulatory approval timelines for novel food ingredients and new food additives are gradually shortening.

"This is a moment worth going all-in on," Dr. Zhe Zeng, NewPro's founder and CEO, told us. Dr. Zeng earned his doctorate from Wageningen University in the Netherlands and helped establish the Wageningen Future Food Institute. He previously served as a senior scientist at Danone's global research center, specializing in functional ingredient R&D, infant formula formulation, and clinical research, and has prior entrepreneurial experience. The core founding team collectively brings over a decade of industrialization experience spanning functional food ingredient development and industrial microbial engineering.

Deep Roots in Dairy, Building a Plug-and-Play Protein Expression Toolbox

Leveraging the founding team's deep expertise in dairy, precision fermentation, and industrial microbiology, NewPro's first bet is lactoferrin — a protein that has attracted considerable market interest in recent years.

Lactoferrin is a high-nutritional-value protein found in mammalian milk, especially human breast milk. It helps regulate immune function, iron absorption, and gut microbiome balance while boosting bodily resistance, and is already widely used in infant formula.

However, conventional production methods extract lactoferrin from natural milk sources, which entails high costs, limited yields, and overseas technological barriers — often leaving global supply unable to meet demand. Major dairy companies have therefore been racing to explore synthetic biology approaches, using microbial precision fermentation to directly synthesize lactoferrin. This new production method maintains product safety, purity, and stability while substantially reducing costs and increasing capacity.

NewPro currently employs Pichia pastoris and multiple filamentous fungal chassis for protein expression, combined with proprietary protein separation and purification processes to improve lactoferrin yield and ultimately lower production costs.

Image | "Animal-free" dairy is coming (Source: NewPro)

According to the company, strain development faces two main hurdles. First, most microbial chassis contain multiple proteases that degrade bovine lactoferrin, preventing complete expression of the target protein. Second, most functional proteins undergo complex modifications — such as glycosylation in bovine lactoferrin — that are difficult to replicate precisely in microbial chassis, potentially compromising product efficacy.

To address this, the NewPro team developed a plug-and-play toolbox for personalized customization of different proteases and glycosylation enzymes tailored to specific proteins. Combined with 15 years of accumulated genome editing tools and components, plus AI algorithms for optimizing personalized elements and high-throughput screening of target proteins, this creates unique chassis and editing advantages that establish NewPro's technological moat in the field.

Dr. Yu Jiang, NewPro's co-founder, noted that the company aims to leverage its past technical accumulation in industrial microbiology to expand into novel food ingredient development and create new products for consumers. Dr. Jiang previously spent over 15 years at the CAS Key Laboratory of Synthetic Biology and the Shanghai Industrial Biotechnology R&D Center, focusing on industrial microbial technology development.

NewPro is currently advancing pilot-scale production and regulatory filings for its lactoferrin ingredient, working toward market launch as soon as possible.

"Lactoferrin is just the beginning — our long-term goal is a cup of customized artificial breast milk. We're gradually expressing the functional proteins found in breast milk one by one," Dr. Zeng said with a smile. He added, however, that nutritional efficacy alone doesn't guarantee commercial success — the market has seen plenty of nutritionally sound products that consumers simply rejected. New food development must prioritize not just nutrition, "but deliciousness too."

This also motivated NewPro's sweetener product development. Current artificial sweeteners mostly carry unavoidable side effects: weight gain, gut microbiome disruption, and increased risk of fatty liver disease and diabetes. "Mining healthy sweet proteins from nature and achieving efficient, low-cost production" has thus become another major industry pursuit.

NewPro is currently using Pichia pastoris and filamentous fungi to express plant-derived sweet proteins, including thaumatin from the West African katemfe fruit and truffle sweet protein from black truffles. In terms of sweetness intensity, "one gram of thaumatin equals roughly 2,000 grams of sucrose," meaning the ingredient requires only minuscule doses — effectively zero-calorie intake. This not only reduces raw material costs but achieves the balance of sweetness with minimal caloric load.

Going forward, sweet proteins could become a natural sweetener for healthy sugar control, satisfying consumer cravings for sweetness with virtually no caloric burden. The product has already undergone small-scale fermentation and volunteer taste testing, confirming no perceptible difference between NewPro's microbial fermentation method and natural extraction.

Image | Sweet proteins tested extensively in beverages (Source: NewPro)

Betting on Potential Blockbusters, Commercialization on the Agenda

Drawing on Dr. Zeng's combined experience in R&D, market strategy, and entrepreneurship, NewPro approaches product selection with rigorous focus on the demand elasticity and full lifecycle value of each category.

Neither lactoferrin nor sweet proteins currently represent massive markets, but both share the potential to expand through continuous application development into genuinely large products. Moreover, within the company's overall strategic framework, these two products are expected to achieve synergies down the line.

On commercialization progress, Dr. Zeng candidly noted that while NewPro is in discussions with multiple global dairy leaders, regulatory approval for novel food ingredients for human consumption takes time. In the interim, the company will first expand application scenarios for both core products into animal nutrition and health, with samples already being tested by select prospective clients.

NewPro also expects to begin capacity construction planning starting in 2025.

"The food ingredient industry has no shortage of creative talent. In the past, people were intimidated by the regulatory challenges of novel food ingredients — hesitant,观望, even stuck in their ways. But now is the moment for bio-manufacturing to advance. We hope to work with more industry peers to create new foods for consumers," Dr. Zeng said.

Mingde Capital partner Mingyi Hu stated that Dr. Zeng and the NewPro team bring deep experience and accumulated expertise in the dairy and bio-manufacturing industries, with comprehensive capabilities spanning chassis development, scale-up manufacturing, clinical research, and commercialization, plus global vision and resources and exceptional execution. He looks forward to NewPro continuing to tackle the R&D and production challenges of key breast milk components and leading industry development.

Linear Capital partner Yingzhe Zeng said that precision fermentation has long been a key focus area for Linear, where product selection, mass production, and market promotion are all indispensable. Active proteins are expressed at very low levels in organisms, requiring extensive separation and purification that drives up costs. Lactoferrin demand has grown rapidly with its broad adoption in formula and supplements, and the NewPro team has leveraged its rich industrialization experience to iterate quickly and dramatically reduce synthesis costs. "We accompanied NewPro through its entire journey from zero to one, endorse its productization approach, and are honored to have completed this exclusive seed round. We look forward to NewPro bringing more healthy functional formulations to global markets."

About Linear Capital

Linear Capital is an early-stage investment firm focused on "frontier technology + industry" — frontier technologies such as data intelligence, digital new infrastructure, next-generation robotics, and technological transformation in traditional sectors (biomedical, materials, energy, etc.), applied across vertical industries to dramatically improve efficiency, solve pain points, and enable industrial upgrading. Through substantial enhancement of industrial value, the firm achieves outsized commercial returns. It currently manages ten funds with approximately $2 billion in total AUM.

We lead primarily at angel through Series A, with check sizes ranging from $1 million to $10 million (or RMB equivalent). To date, we have backed over 120 early-stage teams including Horizon Robotics, Kujiale, Sensors Data, Tezign, Rokid, Guandata, and Agile Robots. The aggregate valuation of Linear's portfolio companies stands at approximately $20 billion.

In the near term, Linear Capital is working to become the premier Data Intelligence Technology Fund, with a long-term vision of evolving into the most influential Frontier Technology Application Fund.