Across the two valleys

The CBE JU funds projects that develop and scale up bio-based innovations, proving that renewable and waste feedstocks can replace fossil-based inputs at industrial scale.

After their completion, many of these projects keep growing and showing further success. They are attracting fresh private and public investment to further scale up or replicate what the project has built, expanding capacity and launching new bio-based products onto the market. AFYREN's biorefinery in eastern France, for example, has moved from start-up to a pre-sold order book worth around €165 million. Avantium's PEFerence plant has already spun out a new, independently funded company. Fibenol is replicating its SWEETWOODS model in a second, commercial-scale biorefinery in Latvia. Microphyt's SCALE plant supplies  growing portfolio of nutrition and skincare ingredients backed by clinical studies.

Crossing two critical valleys

This continuous growth reflects the specific gap the CBE JU as a public-private partnership is designed to bridge. Bio-based innovation has to cross two well-known "valleys of death". The first lies between promising lab research and a working pilot or demonstration. The second, often harder to cross, lies between demonstration and full commercial-scale production. This is where projects are capital-intensive, slow to return on investment and considered too risky by private investors alone. 

By co-funding pre-competitive innovation and first-of-a-kind industrial plants, CBE JU de-risks the development to the point where private capital is willing to back full-scale factories. This turns publicly supported validation into commercial business that keeps delivering well beyond the project's funded lifetime, retaining private investments in innovation in Europe

From funded projects to lasting market impact

These are stories of successfully getting across both “valleys of death”. Research and innovation projects, demonstrators and first-of-a-kind flagship plants covering sectors as diverse as chemicals, construction, materials, food, feed and cosmetics have found their way to delivering products that the market wants to buy at industrial scale.

From publicly supported validation to commercial success

Together, these stories show how one CBE JU-funded project can grow from a single demonstrator or industrial site into a diversified product portfolio, a stable regional employer and a platform for continued innovation. They can also unlock a widening partner network across diverse industrial sectors, regulatory recognition in Europe and in other continents and further private capital or public investment.