I remember when Ÿnsect started appearing everywhere—conferences, government programs, innovation showcases. It had all the ingredients of a European deep-tech success story: a revolutionary idea, a clear ecological purpose, and the kind of ambition that made investors and policymakers visibly proud. A vertical farm producing sustainable protein from mealworms. Clean. Circular. Automated. Scalable. It was the kind of narrative Europe wanted to believe.

And yet in 2025, after raising several hundred million euros, building one of the most advanced bio-industrial facilities in Europe, and solving extremely difficult technical problems, Ÿnsect was liquidated. Not because the technology failed. Not because the founders lacked talent. Not because the idea lacked merit.

Ÿnsect died because its technological ambition ran faster than the market, the economics, and the physical constraints that governed its industrial reality. That gap—between what we can build and what the world can sustain—has become one of the most expensive patterns in European innovation.

What Ÿnsect Actually Built

When people hear “insect farming,” they imagine something simple. What Ÿnsect built was the opposite: a highly complex industrial ecosystem running on biology and automation. The company’s vertical farms required precise control of temperature, humidity, airflow, feeding cycles, and waste flows. A single deviation in environmental conditions could disrupt an entire production cycle. Living organisms do not scale like software; they impose their own pace, limits, and fragilities.

The facilities themselves consumed immense amounts of energy. The logistics were intricate. The machinery required 24/7 reliability. The entire system depended on keeping biological processes stable at industrial scale—a challenge far harder than the public narrative ever suggested.

Seen up close, Ÿnsect’s achievement was real: it engineered one of the most automated bio-industrial operations in Europe. But technological success was only one side of the equation.

The Economic Reality Nobody Wanted to Hear

Insect protein is expensive to produce. Soy and fishmeal are not. That difference—obvious, measurable, and structural—was too often overshadowed by enthusiasm for “sustainable protein.”

Put simply: Ÿnsect was producing a premium ingredient for a market driven almost entirely by price. Aquaculture, livestock feeding, pet food—none of these sectors were prepared to absorb a product several times more expensive than what they already used, no matter how sustainable it was.

Markets don’t shift because a technology is desirable. They shift when costs, infrastructure, and incentives align. In this case, they didn’t.

Ÿnsect was trying to create a new industrial paradigm before the economic conditions existed to sustain it. It was a vision ahead of its market, not aligned with it.

The Trap of Premature Scaling

This is where many deep-tech companies fall: they must scale early to prove viability, yet scaling early dramatically increases fixed costs. Ÿnsect built large facilities to demonstrate production capacity. Those facilities then required production volumes and pricing levels that the market was not ready to support.

The company was effectively running against three clocks at once: the biological cycle of its organisms, the industrial cycle of its factories, and the financial cycle imposed by its investors.

The burn rate accelerated faster than market adoption. The economics never caught up with the engineering. And once fixed costs became unavoidable, flexibility disappeared.

This is not unique to Ÿnsect.

A Pattern Far Beyond Foodtech

Across Europe, we see the same mismatch repeating. Northvolt built one of the world’s most advanced battery gigafactories and still entered restructuring in 2024—not because the technology failed, but because energy costs, supply-chain constraints, and slower-than-expected demand made the economics increasingly fragile. Lilium, the German flying-taxi company, delivered impressive prototypes yet collapsed when confronted with certification timelines and capital requirements far larger than early projections.

In each case, the narrative was strong. The talent was real. The ambition was genuine. But the alignment between technology, infrastructure, regulation, and market demand was missing.

Europe excels at building technically sophisticated solutions. It struggles to make them economically sustainable.

What Ÿnsect Really Teaches Us

What strikes me about Ÿnsect’s collapse is not the failure itself, but what it reveals about how we evaluate industrial innovation. We tend to assume that speed validates progress, that scale validates feasibility, that investment validates strategy, and that narrative validates demand.

But none of these assumptions hold when you enter the world of biology, energy, heavy industry, and physical processes. In these domains, constraints are not obstacles to be ignored; they are the operating system.

The real lesson is simple: technology succeeds only when it aligns with the physics, economics, and timing of its environment. When it runs ahead of any of these, collapse becomes structural, not accidental.

Ÿnsect was technologically ahead. Economically behind. And structurally unbalanced.

The deeper problem is that our innovation culture still treats hard constraints as though they can be willed away. They cannot. They must be integrated into strategy from the beginning.

A More Honest Approach to Industrial Innovation

The Ÿnsect case is valuable because it forces us to ask harder questions, earlier:

Does the market exist today—or only in projection?

Does the technology scale without exponential cost?

Do the biological, physical, and energy constraints allow industrialization?

Can we build incrementally—or must we take a multi-hundred-million-euro leap?

What happens if adoption is slower than expected?

These are not pessimistic questions. They are the foundation of responsible innovation—especially in deep-tech.

Ÿnsect will remain a fascinating chapter in Europe’s technological story: a bold, sincere, highly competent attempt to industrialize a new biological process. The company solved problems that few teams in the world were capable of tackling. But solving technical challenges is not the same as solving economic ones. And the distance between the two is often where the most ambitious ideas break.

When technology outruns the market, the outcome is rarely surprising. It’s predictable. And preventable—if we are willing to confront the constraints that shape the real world.