Editor's note: In our 2024 Startups to Watch feature, the Silicon Valley Business Journal and San Francisco Business Times present startups and founders building groundbreaking products and companies in the Bay Area. BioFluff is one of 17 we profiled this year — to read more about our mission and the other startups we're featuring, click here.
When Martin Stuebler started looking for early funding opportunities for BioFluff, he came across a fashion-focused accelerator in Europe and thought, why not go for it? He didn't know much about fashion — his background was in plant science, as well as mechanical and chemical engineering — but the best route to launching his plant-based fur alternative would be through partnerships with clothing designers and manufacturers.
In 2022, BioFluff was accepted into an accelerator run by one of the largest luxury fashion brands in the world: LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. And at the end of 2023, BioFluff unveiled its first commercially available product under the brand name Savian and partnered with fashion designer Stella McCartney to debut it.
About BioFluff
- Founded: 2022
- Founders: CEO Martin Stuebler, Steven Usdan, Roni Gamzon
- Headquarters: San Francisco and Paris
- Employees: 4 full time, 4 part time
- Total funding: $3.1 million
What was it like getting into the LVMH Innovation accelerator?
Martin Stuebler: In the early days of BioFluff, I applied to every known challenge or prize on this planet. I would literally spend my weekends just looking at sustainability or startup or fashion competitions. I didn't even know what LVMH was, to be honest.
Roni Gamzon: It is based at Station F (in Paris). There's 1,000 startups sitting there, and 150 VCs. The best startups in Europe come there, and you sit together in this co-working space with startups in your sector. We're still part of the program, and they're just incredible. They're like, 'This brand wants to meet you,' or 'We got you a pitch with this brand.' And they're bridging you together as a startup with top brands. For us, it's obviously more of the fashion brands.
If the material isn't animal leather and not plastic, what is it?
Stuebler: It's genuine plant fiber not grown in a reactor, which means we can avoid all the very cost-intensive steps of scaling with living material, which is something I tried with my last company (using mushrooms). We're using general plant material that we're purifying, selecting and screening with an enzymatic process.
What has the process has been like for iterating on prototypes and getting to a point where you can't tell the difference from real fur?
Gamzon: The material Stella (McCartney) chose is something that is like shearling, but it doesn't look one-to-one like sheep shearling. When people see it, they're like, 'Oh, this is new, it's very cool.' That's the difference between the food industry and the fashion industry. The fashion industry is always looking for something new. So, the strategy there is about making it sexy and hyped up.
Stuebler: The alternative food segment is extremely restrictive. There are only five flavors, and I'd say one to two dozen other taste perceptions. All these factors can be measured easily. If we're talking about leather alternatives — mushroom leather, Apple leather, cactus leather — all these materials have a specific set of tests around durability, surface abrasion, flexibility, repeat bendability. And all these tests are also very well studied and can be applied from one leather into another.
When it comes to fur, there's no such tests available. There are no fundamental fur measurements. When you're talking to a tannery people, they will tell you about hand feel tests. Someone touches the material, feels it, pets it for a while, and then gives an assessment of the material. And this is the big challenge that we have, relying on a hand feel test which is highly qualitative and not quantitative.
