Iris Houthoff, who founded Mylium, has just finished Startlife’s Accelerator programme. ‘I got a lot out of it,’ she says. ‘We now have a marketing strategy and a financial plan for the next five years.’ Mylium develops textiles based on mycelium (fungal threads), with the aim of providing a sustainable vegan alternative to animal products such as leather, silk and wool.
Houthoff established Mylium in 2018 and has been based at the Business & Science Park since 2019. There she has her own laboratory for producing and processing mycelium.
The first customer is the fashion industry, which wants to produce sustainable luxury bags made of mycelium
She worked on this part-time at first, as she was also teaching in the Bioprocess Engineering chair group at WUR, but she has now given up that job to work fulltime for Mylium from February, as well as taking on two employees.
Mylium’s fungal threads are suitable for making textiles, but Houthoff is still working on improving the product characteristics. The start-up is planning to start production in a pilot factory at the end of 2021. Its first customer is the fashion industry, which wants to produce sustainable luxury bags made of mycelium. Discussions are taking place with investors with a view to facilitating this.
Mylium is also looking for interns for next year, particularly students who can do market research and who can work in the lab on the production process.