Marama Labs chief technical officer Dr Matthias Meyer (left) and chief executive Dr Brendan Darby.
Marama Labs chief technical officer Dr Matthias Meyer (left) and chief executive Dr Brendan Darby.
2024 could prove to be a vintage year for Marama Labs, which has raised just over $3 million to expand its “hazy wine analysis” business and expand into pharmaceutical manufacturing and life sciences.
The start-up was founded in 2019 to commercialise research conducted at Victoria University by its co-founders, physicistsDr Brendan Darby (today Marama Labs’ chief executive), Dr Matthias Meyer (now the start-up’s chief technology officer) and Professor Eric Le Ru (now the firm’s chief science officer).
The trio discovered what’s billed as “a fundamentally new way to optically interrogate highly cloudy liquids using light-based sensors”. Their breakthrough led to the development of the CloudSpec UV-Vis spectrophotometer - a gadget the size of a small inkjet printer that can be used to assess the quality of wine at each stage of its production.
Marama Labs’ customers include New Zealand wineries Giesen and Cloudy Bay, who have used the platform for three years. In the US, clients include ultra-premium small producers in Napa and top-10 large producers who have deployed the technology across multiple production facilities, the firm says.
Using spectrometry in wine production is not new, but Marama pitches CloudSpec - which connects to a laptop and an app - as cheaper and faster than more traditional alternatives, and they say it’s user-friendly and requires no training.
Darby, who relocated from Dublin to Wellington to pursue his PhD, says: “CloudSpec Insights is designed to give a busy winemaker colour and phenolic data on their wines at all stages of production that is easy to access, understand and act upon. Before CloudSpec, colour and phenolic analysis [that is, analysis of the several hundred compounds that give wine its taste and colour] 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.”.
“Cheap” is relative. CloudSpec and its cloud-based insight software is sold on a subscription model. A base package for a winery starts at US$10,000 per year.
A rep for Marama told the Herald a more traditional spectrometer can cost a winery anywhere from $5000 to $75,000 for the hardware alone.
The early-stage firm has not disclosed any financials, but its performance so far was sufficiently impressive to see an over-subscribed seed round - no mean feat in a venture capital market that has been laid low by high interest rates.
The investment was led by The Yield Lab, a multi-national agritech venture capital firm with an office in Dublin.
Extra funds were also chipped in by existing, New Zealand-based investors, including Crown agency New Zealand Growth Capital Partners, Icehouse Ventures and Quidnet Ventures, and new investors, including NZVC, the venture capital firm formed by Mark Pavlyukovskyy, a Ukrainian who relocated to Queenstown during the pandemic.
What’s next
The $3m will be used to ramp up production of CloudSpec hardware in NZ, and an expansion into pharmaceutical manufacturing and life sciences by the end of this year.
Darby says the same CloudSpec technology used to analyse fermenting wine can be applied to nanoparticles used in new medicines, with similar savings in cost and time.
The start-up has also recently hired its first fulltime salesperson in the US, and developed a partnership model that will its product more readily available to smaller wineries.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
