Surprise! A $600 Million Insect Protein Animal Feed Business Just Went Bankrupt

Essay by Eric Worrall

First published JoNova, Tom Nelson – Even starving dogs wouldn’t eat their product?

How reality crushed Ÿnsect, the French startup that had raised over $600M for insect farming

Anna Heim
2:52 PM PST · December 26, 2025

French startup Ÿnsect shot into the spotlight when “Iron Man” star Robert Downey Jr. touted its merits on the “Late Show” during Super Bowl weekend 2021. Now, nearly four years later, the insect farming company has been placed into judicial liquidation — essentially bankruptcy — for insolvency. 

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And revenue was the problem. According to publicly available data, Ÿnsect’s revenue from its main entity peaked at €17.8 million in 2021 (approximately $21 million) — a figure reportedly inflated by internal transfers between subsidiaries. By 2023, the company had racked up a net loss of €79.7 million ($94 million).

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But the vision collided with market reality. Animal feed is a commodity market driven by price, not sustainability premiums. …

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The 2023 pivot to pet food came too late. By then, Ÿnsect had already committed to a massive, capital-intensive bet that would ultimately doom the company. That bet was Ÿnfarm, a “giga-factory” in Northern France that the company billed “the world’s most expensive bug farm.” Built for insect production at scale, the facility consumed hundreds of millions in funding — money spent before Ÿnsect had proven its business model or figured out its unit economics.

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Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/26/how-reality-crushed-ynsect-the-french-startup-that-had-raised-over-600m-for-insect-farming/

I love it when green activists and clueless Hollywood celebrities think they know how to run a business.

The fools blew hundreds of millions of dollars on a giant production plant, only to discover their target market didn’t exist. By the time they realised their original plan was a bust, they used internal transfers to inflate reported revenue, then tried to retool their plant for their new target market. But there wasn’t enough money left to solve their retooled plant production problems, so they ran out of cash.

Anyone who has ever run their own business knows that if possible you start small and field test your ideas, even if you have lots of capital burning a hole in your pocket. No business plan survives contact with reality, you have to test and refine your plan, and if necessary completely ditch the original plan and pivot into doing something new, while preserving as much capital as possible for the big push once your idea starts to generate revenue.