Swedish Algae Factory - a visionary algae team
Swedish Algae Factory is a privately owned company founded in 2016 by Angela Wulff, a professor in marine ecology and Sofie Allert, a biotechnical engineer with a master’s in business development. The company was founded with the vision to harness nature’s perfection to transform industries, and utilize algae as a high-performance raw material.
From the lab to larger greenhouses
We started to grow our algae in the lab at the University of Gothenburg followed by a small 6 sqm greenhouse at the University premises before the company was founded. In 2016 when the company was founded, we started to cultivate our algae in a 23 sqm prototype greenhouse in Kungshamn, Sweden. Meanwhile, we started our collaboration with a food industry company in the same area, utilizing their wastewater for growing our algae and at the same time cleaning it and returning it for a circular economy. Based on our cultivation learnings we filed our first patent in 2017. In 2018 we established our pilot plant which 10 doubled our greenhouse space and started to produce Algica® in small commercial volumes at the same site. 2020 marked the construction of our large-scale factory in Kungshamn.
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I took the step from being a passionate SCUBA diver to a PhD in marine ecology with focus on microalgae. The more I learned, the more fascinated I became, and I was particularly interested in microalgae living in extreme environments, like inside ice. I wanted to further explore their potential in industrial applications and luckily I met Sofie."
Angela Wulff, co-founder
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I fell in love with algae during my bachelor thesis in biotechnology. For me, it was an extremely sustainable underused resource since algae grow fast and can be cultivated on saltwater and wastewater. Back then most algae species that had been studied for industrial use preferred warm and sunny climates. I met my co-founder Angela in 2013. She had recently joined a research expedition to Antarctica sampling ice-inhabiting microalgae. Together we thought that if algae could grow in the ice, it would also be possible to create an algae industry in the cold and dark climates of the Nordics. With our love for algae and our passion to contribute to a better world we decided to set out to show that it is possible to create a climate positive industry with the help of algae."
Sofie Allert, CEO and co-founder