Deeptech spectroscopy startup Marama Labs closes oversubscribed seed-plus round

Marama Labs, a New Zealand and Ireland-based deeptech startup, has closed a seed-plus round of €1.75 million. 

The company is developing novel spectroscopy technology for chemical analysis of complex liquids in industries including wine and life sciences.

The investment – led by The Yield Lab, a European agritech venture capital firm leveraged through the startup's Irish connection – will position Marama Labs for hardware manufacturing scale-up in New Zealand for its patented CloudSpec spectroscopy instrumentation and data analytics tools, as well as a strategic 2024 entry into the life-sciences market. 

Spectroscopy is the study of the absorption and emission of light and other radiation by matter.

“We’ve been really impressed by the Marama Labs team’s progress to date, taking a highly complex technology out of the lab in New Zealand and now gaining significant traction in global markets like winemaking and life sciences,” says John Carrigan, investment director at The Yield Lab (Europe). 

“This is a technology and company that we see creating real benefits to the planet.” 

Existing investors, including New Zealand Growth Capital Partners, Icehouse Ventures, Quidnet Ventures and New Zealand angel groups, and new investors DeepIE, Radar Ventures, NZVC and angel and high-net-worth investors from New Zealand, Ireland and Germany, also participated in the round.

“This oversubscribed funding round demonstrates the conviction new and existing investors have for Marama Labs’ vision of optimising the world’s liquid resources through spectroscopy analysis,” says Dr Brendan Darby, CEO and co-founder of Marama Labs. 

The traction shown to date and the potential is proven in the range of investors and a credit to the growing Marama Labs team, he says.

“We’re really excited about the potential of the technology to help the world.”

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From winemaking…

Marama Labs, a Victoria University of Wellington spinout company, was founded in 2019 by physicists Darby and the company’s CTO, Dr Matthias Meyer and its CSO, Professor Eric Le Ru, when they discovered a new way to optically interrogate highly cloudy liquids using light-based sensors. 

The breakthrough led to the development of its CloudSpec UV-Vis spectrophotometer. 

With wine, the Cloudspec device provides winemakers with accessible and actionable colour and phenolic data throughout the wine production cycle. Customers can then use the data to produce better quality and more consistent wines.

“Before CloudSpec, colour and phenolic analysis was time consuming, expensive and overly complex. We’ve simplified the process and are seeing our customers gain valuable business insights by using this data in the vineyard, winery and retail market,” says Darby. 

The technology has been adopted by New Zealand wineries, including Giesen and Cloudy Bay, as well as clients in the US, ranging from small Napa producers to top-10 large producers. 

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…to life-sciences

Beyond winemaking, Marama Labs has expanded the CloudSpec technology into its next target vertical of the life-sciences market, where opaque liquids are a significant hurdle for drug discovery, process monitoring, quality assurance and new product development. 

The wine industry has been the “perfect first market” for the startup, given its New Zealand origin, says Darby. However, as life sciences is the largest market for spectroscopy technologies, the founders had always planned to expand into this sector when the timing was right.

“It’s exciting to broaden our markets,” he says.

The company has commercial trials with leading pharmaceutical manufacturers in Europe, the US and Japan.

Darren Andrews, former founder of handheld spectroscopy company Cobalt Light Systems, has been appointed Marama Labs’ chief product officer of life sciences to support this move. 

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