SEALEO
The Challenge
For 40 years, pharmaceutical industry has relied on the same archaic materials to transport temperature-sensitive medicines like vaccines and insulin: expanded polystyrene (EPS) and gel packs. They are bulky, thermally inefficient, typically single-use, and can persist for centuries after one shipment.
In a typical 48-hour shipper, 93% of the box is packaging rather than payload. Since freight is priced by size and weight, every shipment carries the cost of inefficiency.
Routes are becoming hotter and less predictable. The industry’s answer? More insulation and coolant. The medicines of tomorrow need materials that protect longer, ship lighter and disappear responsibly after use.
The Opportunity
Sealeo is a bio-based, plastic-free alternative to single-use thermal packaging. Our patent-pending technology converts seaweed into 2 advanced materials. A bio-coolant acts as thermal buffer, absorbing incoming heat, and delivering 2.5 times longer cooling than synthetic gel packs, and biofoam insulation: a lightweight porous layer that reduces heat ingress and keeps medicines cold for 50% longer than EPS in the same box size. This allows customers to either ship further or move to smaller packaging formats that reduce distribution costs by up to 38%. Combined, our system preserves the industry’s preferred single-use model while removing the end-of-life burden.
The team
The Venture
Business Model
We are entering the $28 billion pharmaceutical cold-chain packaging market, starting with a $4 billion single-use parcel segment. Sealeo saves customers ~ £2 per box in total cost of ownership by reducing packaging volume and weight. Our first revenue stream is direct B2B unit sales to pharmaceutical manufacturers, CROs, 3PLs and healthcare logistics providers in the UK and EU. Once validated in pharma, Sealeo will supply and license components to incumbent cold-chain packaging providers. Longer term, we will expand through co-development and licensing across food, agriculture, specialty chemicals and thermal management applications.
Competition
The market is dominated by incumbent providers, whose systems are widely adopted, but still rely on legacy materials and face growing regulatory and ESG pressure around end-of-life waste. A new generation of biomaterial packaging companies is emerging, but many either lack pharma-grade thermal validation, or face material limits around moisture sensitivity, feedstock consistency and food or land competition.
Sealeo differentiates by offering a full thermal system: biofoam insulation plus bio-coolant, designed as a drop-in replacement for pharmaceutical cold-chain packaging.
Traction
Sealeo has secured LOIs from leading medtech, pharma and logistics companies, with pilots planned within the next six months. We have raised over £750,000, including £600,000 in non-dilutive funding from the Royal Academy of Engineering, Undaunted, Innovate UK amongst others, and were named London Startup of the Year 2026.
We are de-risking technology through SusPack, a £10 million Innovate UK consortium, with strategic partnerships across the full value chain: from feedstock sourcing and processing to manufacturing scale-up, biodegradation testing and customer adoption.