From first principles to first brewery.

Back in 2017, our fermer-in-chief and physicist Adnan Oner asked himself a simple question: which important problem is almost no one solving? After reading hundreds of papers and years of research, he came to the conclusion that the sheer amount of land the world needs to feed itself is stopping progress.

That led him to something almost no one was working on: making protein independent of agricultural land. Because landless fermentation has such a tiny foodprint, it opens up a rare opportunity. Instead of consuming, we could free up land, rewild the planet to draw down gigatons of carbon, increase the carrying capacity of all life, make more room for energy and civilization.

Farmless was founded in Amsterdam at the end of 2022 to turn that idea into reality. Within two years, we validated our complete fermentation-to-protein process at pilot scale. Today the whole team of committed fermers works from a single Amsterdam housing R&D labs, a pilot brewery, food studio, professional kitchen and offices all under one roof. We’ve taken the messy supply chain of protein production and compressed it in space and time. We can now grow protein continuously in minutes compared to the months or years it used to take.

Our focus now is scaling production in order-of-magnitude steps toward commercial volumes, securing regulatory approval in our key markets, and working with food companies to bring tasty food to your table.

We’re a small, deeply curious and highly technical team with food, fermentation and soft-hardware expertise shaped at The Vegetarian Butcher, Perfect Day, LanzaTech and elsewhere. We’re based inside Amsterdam’s city ring: a place we can attract exceptional people from around the world—and bike to work.

Built in Amsterdam.

The Netherlands is one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, with a mindset of pushing the boundaries of food production and the practical expertise to scale our fermentation platform. We also believe hardware startups can thrive in Europe. It has the world’s toughest novel-food process, so if we can make it here, we can make it anywhere (also we want Europe to accelerate).

We’ve raised more than €12 million from investors including World Fund, Vorwerk Ventures, Revent and Nucleus, alongside local and European grants.