Bristol’s Ponda, the biomaterials company behind the plant-based insulation material BioPuff, has secured a €2.76 million (£2.35 million) grant to lead what the company is calling one of the world’s largest wetland farming demonstrations supporting peatland regeneration.

The grant was awarded by DEFRA’s Farming Innovation Programme and will support a 30-month project and establish a 30-hectare demonstration site for growing typha (bulrush), as well as the establishment of a consortium.

Led by Ponda, the consortium brings together J&K Barnard Farms, Liverpool John Moores University, Lancashire Wildlife Trust, Finance Earth and Berghaus to demonstrate how productive wetland farming can generate environmental and economic value while helping establish a new UK biomaterials supply chain.

This follows their €2 million raise in 2025, and the launch of their crowdfunding campaign in April of this year. Including grants and awards, the company has now secured €5.6 million ($6.5 million) in funding.

Julian Ellis-Brown, co-founder and CEO of Ponda, says: “This funding is a major milestone for Ponda because it moves our work beyond pilot projects towards the real-world production systems the market needs. We’re not simply developing a new material – we’re building the agricultural, processing and supply chain needed to produce it at scale.”

Ponda’s €2.76 million DEFRA grant adds to approximately €118.7 million in financing announced during 2026 across European biomaterials, bio-based textile technologies and adjacent circular-materials companies covered by EU-Startups.

The UK accounts for several of the comparable announcements, including Sparxell’s €4.2 million pre-Series A, Naturbeads’ €4.1 million EU grant and Epoch Biodesign’s €10.3 million financing, while Bristol-based Uplift360 and Mykor secured €7.4 million and €4.6 million respectively.

Elsewhere, funding ranged from Salt & Fiber’s €300k pre-Seed round for seagrass-based textile yarns to PaperShell’s financing of up to €40.3 million for fossil-free composite production, alongside rounds for Octarine Bio, Foamlab, Seprify and Syntetica.

Mike Longden, Peatland Programme Technical Lead, Lancashire Wildlife Trust adds: “This is an exciting project with significant economic and environmental benefits. Demonstrating a commercially viable approach to managing lowland peat at scale- one that improves biodiversity while supporting sustainable farming has huge potential to transform how we manage these landscapes for the future.”

Founded in 2020, Ponda is a biomaterials company developing regenerative materials for the textile industry. Its first product, BioPuff, is a plant-based insulation made from fibres extracted from bulrush grown on restored wetlands through paludiculture.

BioPuff has been developed as a renewable alternative to fossil fuel-based synthetic insulation and conventional animal down. The material has the potential to reduce embedded carbon by up to 88% compared with goose down and has already featured in products from Berghaus, Stella McCartney, Ahluwalia and Sheep Inc.

At the heart of the project is a simple idea: peatlands should not have to be drained to be economically productive. Through paludiculture, wetlands remain wet, continue storing carbon, recover biodiversity and produce commercially valuable crops.

Over the course of the project, the consortium aims to:

  • Restore peatland at landscape scale through productive wetland farming.
  • Demonstrate typha yields of approximately three tonnes per hectare
  • Avoid an estimated 15,000 tonnes of CO₂e emissions by 2050
  • Create new income opportunities for farmers and landowners through commercially viable wetland crops.

Financial modelling by Finance Earth suggests the demonstration could begin generating commercial revenues within 12 months of project completion, providing an important proof point for wetland farming as a scalable agricultural model.

According to the company, drained peatlands are among the UK’s largest sources of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Rewetting these landscapes through paludiculture offers a practical way to reduce emissions while improving climate resilience and maintaining productive land use.

In addition to avoiding carbon emissions, restored wetlands can:

  • improve natural flood management;
  • increase biodiversity by rebuilding wetland habitats;
  • reduce soil degradation and erosion; and
  • diversify farm incomes through the cultivation of high-value biomaterial crops.

Will Barnard, Environmental Manager at J&K Barnard Farms, says: “What makes this project important is that it brings together every part of the system- from land management and crop production to processing and end use. Support from the Farming Innovation Programme is helping accelerate work that has the potential to demonstrate that wetland farming can be operationally credible, commercially viable and scalable.”