Michael Kingsbury spent years optimizing mining operations for BHP, Australia's resource giant, before he decided the real automation problem worth solving wasn't in the Pilbara iron ore pits. It was figuring out how to turn seaweed into a material that could replace petroleum-based plastics—and do it at a price point someone might actually pay.
On October 29, his company Uluu—pronounced "you-loo," like the sound you might make contemplating the sheer audacity of the challenge—closed a A$16 million Series A round led by Munich-based Burda Principal Investments. The funding brings total capital raised to roughly A$24 million since Kingsbury and co-founder Dr. Julia Reisser launched the venture in 2021. Now comes the hard part: proving the science can survive contact with commercial reality.
The money will build a demonstration plant in Western Australia capable of producing ten tonnes of biopolymer annually—a hundred-fold leap from the company's current 100-kilogram pilot capacity. It's still nowhere near the thousands of tonnes needed to genuinely compete with conventional plastics. But it's the kind of intermediate step that separates genuine material science companies from the ones that never escape the lab.
"This is where most biomaterials companies hit a wall," said one investor familiar with the space who wasn't involved in the round and asked not to be named. "You can make anything work at bench scale. Commercial scale is a different universe."
From Ocean Cleanup to Ocean Materials
Reisser, a marine scientist who previously worked on The Ocean Cleanup project—the ambitious if sometimes controversial effort to collect plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—brings a certain credibility to the venture. She's seen the problem firsthand. Kingsbury, with his operational background, knows what it takes to make industrial processes actually run at scale and margin. Together, they're betting on polyhydroxyalkanoates, or PHAs, a class of biopolymers that microorganisms naturally produce when stressed.
The Uluu process starts with Gracilaria seaweed, cultivated in Indonesia. The company extracts sugars from the seaweed, ferments them using salt-tolerant microbes in a process that doesn't require fresh water, then pelletizes the resulting material. The pellets—at least in theory—can run through standard plastics manufacturing equipment, eliminating one of the major adoption hurdles that trip up alternative materials.
Uluu claims its output is reusable, recyclable, home-compostable, and marine-biodegradable. The company also says production could sequester or avoid roughly five kilograms of CO₂ equivalent per kilogram produced, though those figures haven't been independently verified. Third-party life-cycle assessments tend to reveal uncomfortable truths about "climate-friendly" materials once you account for farming, processing, and transportation emissions.
Brand Appetite, Small Batches
Still, Uluu has picked up a few early commercial partnerships—modest in volume, but symbolically useful. Quiksilver, the surf brand, bundled Uluu-made wax combs with boardshorts in January 2024, marking the startup's first commercial product. More recently, luxury sleepwear maker Papinelle launched buttons "Made with Uluu" in its September 2025 collection. Buttons. Not entire garments, just buttons.
"Buttons are just the beginning," Kingsbury said at the time, perhaps more hopefully than the phrase suggests. "Our materials can replace plastic across rigid products as well as films, foams and fabrics." Audi also shows up in the company's partnership materials, though what that relationship actually entails remains unclear—auto companies have a habit of announcing material "collaborations" that amount to little more than testing samples.
Uluu is also working with Deakin University to spin its polymers into yarns and fabrics, aiming to move beyond the rigid, injection-molded parts that make up most early PHA applications. Textiles would open a far larger addressable market, assuming the material properties hold up through washing, wearing, and whatever else people do to their clothes.
The Indonesia Connection
The seaweed comes from Indonesia, specifically through a memorandum of understanding signed in 2023 with Mina Agar Makmur, a cooperative cultivating about 1,200 hectares. Uluu tested more than 40 samples from Indonesia, the Philippines, China, South Africa, and Australia before settling on Gracilaria as the most viable feedstock. The conversion ratio: ten tonnes of seaweed to produce roughly one tonne of Uluu plastic. At demonstration scale, that means sourcing 100 tonnes of seaweed annually. At commercial scale? The math gets trickier.
Indonesia has vast seaweed farming capacity—it's the world's largest producer—but coordinating reliable, consistent supply from smallholder cooperatives is a different challenge than engineering the fermentation process. Agricultural supply chains have a tendency to introduce variability that laboratory scientists find frustrating.
Regulatory Winds, Market Reality
The funding arrives as Australia tightens packaging regulations. National targets set for 2025 require all packaging to be reusable, recyclable, or compostable—aspirational goals that most observers agree won't be met on time. Western Australia has rolled out staged bans on single-use plastics through 2023 and 2025. South Australia, characteristically aggressive, became the first jurisdiction globally to ban single-use soy sauce and fish sauce packets. (One imagines the takeout lobby was displeased.)
Whether those bans translate into meaningful market pull for alternatives like Uluu's remains unclear. Regulators can outlaw certain plastics; they can't force companies to pay a premium for replacements, especially when virgin petroleum-based plastic remains cheap and abundant.
The PHA market itself is small. Mordor Intelligence projects global volumes rising from 49,000 tonnes in 2025 to roughly 142,000 tonnes by 2030—growth, certainly, but tiny compared to the 390 million tonnes of conventional plastics produced annually worldwide. Seaweed-based bioplastics occupy an even narrower slice. Grand View Research pegs that segment at US$106 million in 2024, growing to US$146 million by 2030. For context, the global plastics market exceeds US$600 billion.
Other players are circling the space. Notpla, a UK startup that won the Earthshot Prize for seaweed packaging, focuses on liquid sachets. California's Sway, targeting flexible packaging, raised US$5 million in seed funding in February 2024. None have reached anything approaching commercial scale either.
The Syndicate
Burda Principal Investments, which first backed Uluu in 2023, led the Series A. "Having first invested in Uluu in 2023, we're excited to further deepen our partnership," said Christian Teichmann, the firm's CEO, deploying the sort of measured enthusiasm typical of follow-on rounds. Main Sequence, the CSIRO-founded deep-tech VC that led Uluu's A$8 million seed round in November 2022, participated again—a positive signal, given that deep-tech investors often lose patience between lab and commercialization.
Startmate, the accelerator program Uluu graduated from in 2021, joined, as did Novel Investments, described as the family office of one of the world's largest textile groups. (The anonymity is deliberate; ultra-high-net-worth families rarely advertise their bets on unproven technologies.) Additional investors include Fairground, Trinity Ventures, and model-turned-investor Karlie Kloss, who came in via Main Sequence's Voice Capital vehicle during the seed round. Kloss, for what it's worth, has built a reasonably serious investment portfolio focused on sustainability and technology.
What Happens Next
Uluu grew from 13 to 23 employees in 2025 and continues hiring across technical, operations, and commercial roles—headcount growth that suggests the company is serious about moving fast. Reisser and Kingsbury have accumulated hardware: a 2025 SXSW Innovation Award in Sustainability Solutions, Western Australia's 2024 Rio Tinto Emerging Innovation Award, a Business News "Great for the State" Platinum Award. In 2024, the company also received a A$200,000 Western Australia Commercialisation Bridge Grant to support scale-up efforts. Awards are nice. Grants help. Neither guarantees the demonstration plant will produce material at a cost anywhere near conventional plastic.
That's the central question. Not whether Uluu can make seaweed-based biopolymer—it already has. Not whether brands will experiment with small batches—a few have. The question is whether the economics survive the jump from ten tonnes to ten thousand tonnes, and whether customers will pay the inevitable premium even if they do.
The demonstration plant will offer the first real answer. Perhaps more than the founders expected when they started.
