Founderland Awards Q1 2026 Forward Grant to PalmPro
#ForwardGrants
Founderland is pleased to announce Ruth Ogbevire and PalmPro as the recipients of the Q1 2026 Founderland Forward Grant.
The Forward Grant was created to provide timely, catalytic capital to founders building solutions with the potential for outsized impact. This quarter’s recipient reflects that mission clearly.
The challenge
Vegetable oil production is deeply inefficient. Oil mills lose between 5 and 15 percent of extractable oil during processing, resulting in billions in lost value annually. This inefficiency contributes to unnecessary deforestation, significant greenhouse gas emissions, and rising pressure on global food systems at a time when demand continues to increase.
For processors, this translates into millions in lost revenue per facility. For smallholder producers, it reduces income and competitiveness. At a system level, it creates a false trade-off between increasing production and protecting natural ecosystems.
The solution
PalmPro is addressing this challenge by engineering enzymes that operate at the high temperatures of real industrial oil mills. These enzymes release trapped oil during processing, increasing extraction yields without requiring additional farmland.
By improving extraction efficiency by even a few percentage points, PalmPro has the potential to unlock significant additional supply from existing crops. This reduces waste, improves margins for processors, and lowers the environmental impact of oil production.
The underlying technology is designed as a scalable platform, with applications across palm, rapeseed, soybean, sunflower, and biofuel production.
Why the jury selected GenScan AI
The Forward Grant jury highlighted the clarity of the problem, the strength of the commercial logic, and the technical differentiation of the solution.
Ruth has combined early technical validation with strong market insight, including direct engagement with industry players and initial partnership traction. The approach addresses a well-understood industry constraint with a novel method that could achieve commercial viability where previous attempts have failed.
The jury also noted the potential for system-level impact, given the scale of global oil production and the relevance of the solution across multiple supply chains.
What the grant enables
The €10,000 Forward Grant will support PalmPro in filing critical intellectual property and advancing its enzyme screening platform.
These steps are essential to protecting the company’s technical advantage and accelerating progress toward pilot-ready validation. The funding is deployed at a moment where both speed and defensibility are critical.
This is exactly what the Forward Grant exists to do: deploy catalytic capital at the right moment to help founders unlock their next phase of growth.
Looking ahead
PalmPro is now focused on advancing its technology toward lab validation and pilot deployment with industry partners.
We encourage the community to follow Ruth Ogbevire and PalmPro as the company continues its journey.
Learn more at https://www.palmproenzymes.com/.
About the Founderland Forward Grant
The Founderland Forward Grant provides equity-free funding to founders building ambitious, high-impact companies. Grants are designed to support critical inflection points, enabling founders to move faster and build with greater focus.