Green Bioactives

The Journey

Appreciating the potential of his technology, companies began approaching Professor Loake and in response he founded GBL in order to begin the commercialisation of this platform technology. An ICURe workshop in Bristol and a subsequent pitch at the Institute of Directors in London resulted in £180K funding from IUK, together with additional investment from friends and family and a business loan, this collectively provided the wherewithal for GBL to start-up at the Roslin Innovation Centre (RIC), a site of excellence for Scottish Biotechnology. Unfortunately, the pandemic then struck, significantly precluding GBL’s travel plans to help drive business development. Fortunately, customers came to GBL, enabling them to demonstrate significant market traction.

A pre-seed investment raise from HNW individuals in early 2022 enabled the extension of their funding “runway” which helped them complete their Seed Round investment raise of ~£3M from local and overseas investors in late 2022. This subsequently primed their move to the Pentland Science Park (PSP), just 300M down the road from the RIC, keeping GBL within the Midlothian Science Zone. At PSP GBL were able to build their R and D capacity and expand their team, including key C-suite hires. This R and D expansion supported the generation of key patent applications, the development of their own in-house products and the co-development of other products with multinational companies. In early 2024 their first in-house product entered the market. Founder and CSO Professor Gary Loake said “it has been both a pleasure and privilege to help our highly talented team build GBL”. David McElroy, CEO of GBL said “Our vision is now to become the world’s leading supplier of plant cell culture-derived natural products.”