ByBug Turns Insect Larvae into Low-Cost Biofactories for Animal Health

Turning a larva into a living biofactory doesn’t sound, at first glance, like a solution to one of the biggest problems in the global food industry. However, that’s exactly what ByBug , the Chilean biotech company, is doing. They’ve just opened a new investment round through Broota, allowing anyone to invest from $500,000 in a technology that aims to drastically reduce losses due to disease in animal production.

Currently, nearly 20% of global animal production for human consumption is lost to infectious diseases, equivalent to US$300 billion in annual losses. In many cases, treating a sick animal is more expensive than culling it, and existing biological solutions—vaccines or therapeutic proteins—are often prohibitively expensive due to their high production costs and complex logistics, such as requiring individual injections.

ByBug proposes a paradigm shift. Instead of industrial bioreactors, the company uses genetically edited black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens) larvae to produce orally administered therapeutic proteins , integrated directly into the animal’s feed. The result is a cost reduction of up to 100 times compared to traditional methods and a 99.8% smaller carbon footprint , by utilizing agri-food byproducts as a base input.

Founded by a multidisciplinary team that evolved from early biotech ventures into ByBug Synthetics, the startup emerged through GridX

The story of this startup began more than eight years ago, when biotechnology engineers Daniel Troncoso (32) and José del Solar (29) met at university. Daniel mentored José in his first venture, InmunoDomain, a recombinant protein-based HPV detection test. Later, together with logistics technician Rocío Espinoza (38), they developed InsectRevolution (2020), an urban system for valorizing agri-food byproducts using black soldier fly larvae, implementing a pilot program in the Municipality of Providencia that managed 3 tons of waste per month.

In 2022, the ByBug team joined the venture builder GridX program, where they met Gerardo Bluske (36), an industrial civil engineer, who became their fourth partner. ByBug Synthetics was officially born there, with the vision of transforming insects into biofactories capable of sustainably producing recombinant proteins.

During 2023, the company closed its pre-seed round with participation from GridX, Pablo Zamora , Ariel Gringaus, and Alan Farcas . It was twice selected as the most innovative startup by Start-Up Chile, established its private R&D center in Coquimbo, and achieved its first proof of concept in gene editing through a collaboration with the University of Maryland.

In 2024, ByBug closed its US$1.4 million seed round , with investment from GridX, Südlich Capital, Halcyon Venture Partners, Arpegio, and Atento Capital (George Kaiser Family Foundation). It established scientific partnerships with five Chilean and two international universities, filed three international patents, and optimized its gene-editing methodology, generating two strains focused on applications for salmon farming .

ByBug targets nearly US$49 million in annual revenue while cutting new strain development time from 12 months to just three

At the moment, ByBug has over 28 agreements with players in the animal health industry and has ongoing pilot projects with companies like BioMar in Chile and Almar in Ecuador, with an estimated annual revenue potential of US$48.8 million if these projects scale. On the technological front, the company already holds three international patents and has a portfolio of three therapeutics in development , in addition to having reduced the time required to generate new strains from 12 months to just 3 .

The opening of the funding round at Broota marks a rare milestone for a deeptech biotech company : democratizing access to investment traditionally reserved for specialized funds. For the platform, the appeal lies in the combination of radical efficiency, early market validation, and a thesis of global impact in a sector that currently lacks scalable solutions.

The capital raised by ByBug will be used to accelerate field trials and strengthen the company’s R&D center, with the aim of progressively replacing chemicals and antibiotics with sustainable biological solutions.

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(Featured image by David Clode via Unsplash)

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