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How Revive Eco scaled from game-changing idea to global potential

Glasgow biotech start-up Revive Eco is running a revolution, transforming used coffee grounds into sustainable alternatives for environmentally harmful ingredients. Learn how investing inwards helped the company to scale up and go global. 

8 January 2025 | 5 minute read

One man’s trash really is another man’s treasure – particularly according to Glasgow startup Revive Eco. This innovative biotech company takes used coffee grounds and transforms them into alternatives for environmentally harmful virgin ingredients, such as palm and coconut oil.

Over the last five years, Revive Eco’s founders have built the company up using funding from several sources, including investment from Scottish Enterprise, to take it from an idea to a market-ready solution.

Revive Eco’s coffee waste revolution

Revive Eco’s founders, Scott Kennedy and Fergus Moore, share a passion for taking waste products and transforming them into something useable. It was while they were studying at Glasgow’s Strathclyde University and working in hospitality that they homed in on one source of waste that would go on to form the foundation of Revive Eco: spent coffee grounds.

Much of the waste from hospitality businesses, like the cafes Scott and Fergus worked in, is spent coffee grounds. Each year in the UK, around 500,000 tonnes of spent coffee grounds are generated, with a huge portion ending up in landfill. While there are sustainable ways to use this kind of waste – composting is a common option, along with donating to local community gardens – transforming it into another product entirely is new territory.

Revive Eco was formed in 2015 and in 2021 Scott, Fergus and their team developed the technology to extract and purify coffee oil from used coffee grounds. Their research showed that this could be used as a sustainable alternative to other damaging virgin ingredients.

Approximately 70 million tonnes of palm oil are produced annually for use across the cosmetics and food industries. An environmentally harmful product, its production is one of the main drivers of deforestation and carbon emissions globally. 

A groundbreaking solution finds its funding

With two business degrees, a passion and an idea, Fergus and Scott founded Revive Eco and set out to find funding. With the potential for a game-changing sustainable solution, it quickly secured £235,000 from Zero Waste Scotland. This was used to begin a 12-month project to develop what would go on to be its revolutionary, patent-pending process for producing high-value chemicals from used coffee grounds.

In 2022, Revive launched a crowdfunding campaign with a target of £150,000 to scale up its manufacturing capacity and grow its small team. It raised 219% of this target, and used the funds to further grow its team, continue its exciting research and development (R&D) work and begin its scale up journey. The crowdfunding journey saw over 700 investors investing in Revive and ignited a passion for community building in the company.

Later that year, Revive opened its first seed funding round, where we joined the company on its journey Alongside the University of Strathclyde and private investor Gabriel Investment Syndicate, the company raised £375,000 to start commercialising its now patented process. It did this by scaling its manufacturing capability and adding further technical expertise to the team.

Most recently, Revive revisited its crowdfunding roots, raising an additional £54,000 as part of a further investment raise. This saw some key new investors joining the company to help with its strategic and environmental ambitions. This investment helped Revive’s scaling work, leading to a pilot scale up project with a manufacturing partner Europe - a truly significant milestone in the company’s growth plans.

Investing inward for growth

When you know you have a product with potential and interest from global brands, it’s likely tempting to want to spend (on marketing, travel, networking and so on) to secure deals. But without the capability to produce enough supply to match demand, this is a big risk.

The sensible, but arguably harder move, is to invest inwards and build your business. So, when the time for taking on clients comes, your business is ready.” This is what Revive did, and it paid off.

Since it initially developed its process for extracting coffee oil from grounds, it has successfully scaled up to a large lab scale, enabling it to provide samples to a range of global skin care and food and drink companies.

Revive have partnered with a French scale up partner to run a pilot project, enabling the company to scale up outside their lab for the first time. This enables the company to demonstrate its process at scale and supply higher quantities of material into the skincare market in the UK and Europe.

At every stage, the company has been true to its environment-focused roots, optimising its process with environmental efficiency at the forefront of its development. This helps to ensure that the process is sustainable even when scaled.

Revive’s plans for the future

Revive’s goal is a truly closed-loop system where it collects used coffee grounds from retail and other partners and processes them to create a range of sustainable and high-value ingredients for skincare and food and drink applications.

Early-stage life cycle analysis shows that Revive’s patented process could produce coffee oil with up to three times less carbon emissions than those released to produce the same quantity of palm oil. As well as this, each tonne of used coffee grounds Revive diverts from landfill reduces CO2 emissions by approximately 1.8 tonnes.

After a lot of time, effort and investment, Revive Eco is now a team of seven. The company has embarked on an exciting scaling journey, engaging with cosmetics brands across Europe. It’s also launched a pilot project with a manufacturing partner.

Revive is well on its way to achieving its mission of redefining waste and inspiring a sustainable future. With plans to launch its first skincare ingredients to market over the coming months, it aims to start making waves in the market and demonstrating that upcycled ingredients are the future. Revive has been able to reach this point because the company was brave enough to prioritise its own productivity - investing in the right tools and team to help it scale and become market ready.

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