From exploiting nature to collaborating with it

For centuries, visionary thinkers have looked to nature for inspiration, from engineers modeling buildings on termite mounds to designers studying bird flight for innovation in mobility.

This philosophy, known as biomimicry, holds extraordinary potential. Yet despite its promise, translating nature-inspired innovations into scalable market-ready solutions remains a challenge.

This is the gap that Anima aims to fill.

The mission of Anima

Anima was created to bridge the gap between scientific findings and real-world innovation. Its goal is to transform nature-inspired innovations into innovative, sustainable, and scalable companies to achieve impact.

Anima believes in the power of entrepreneurship to create the world we want to live in, and maximize the positive impact on climate change that bio-inspired solutions can offer.

They collaborate to create ventures where ecological impact and economic growth go hand in hand.

What is Anima?

Anima is a Venture Studio specializing in biomimicry. Unlike traditional incubators or startup studios, Anima doesn’t incubate projects, it co-builds them.

Its team of seasoned entrepreneurs partners with researchers, founders, and engineers to transform scientific discoveries into funded and market-ready companies, bringing strategy, capital, and execution together under one roof.

Anima invests directly in its ventures, providing both hands-on operational support and financial capital in exchange for equity, ensuring long-term alignment.

With decades of experience in entrepreneurship and climate deeptech, the team helps ventures move from prototype to market faster and with greater impact.

Origins and team

After 10 years working at the crossroads of environmental biotech and bio-inspiration, leading Glowee, a biological lighting system, Sandra Rey partnered with Florence Durillon and Alexandre Cadain, both repeat entrepreneurs and investors, to combine operations, strategy and funding to amplify biomimicry’s impact.

Anima is part of a larger group, Aleph Studios, operating together with the Fund Alpha Star, a portfolio of 16 ventures, but also Batch Ventures, a US VC firm dedicated to investing in Y Combinator companies.

The Venture Studio model

Anima operates across four key areas:

1. Pre-seed support, guiding ideas from concept to launch.
2. Equity investment, ensuring long-term alignment between studio and startup.
3. Operational support, providing strategic guidance, networks, and hands-on assistance.
4. Exclusive focus on bio-inspiration, supporting ventures in a field that requires both scientific rigor and entrepreneurial agility.

This model enables Anima to convert promising ideas into companies capable of delivering real-world solutions.

Asteria: Anima’s first venture

Asteria is the first startup developed within Anima’s Venture Studio, in partnership with Ceebios.

As Anima’s first venture, Asteria demonstrates how the Venture Studio model can turn scientific knowledge into an actionable product, combining strategic investment, operational support, and ecosystem expertise.

The future of Anima

Asteria is the beginning of Anima’s journey. The studio is working on new startups addressing critical environmental challenges such as sustainable materials, regenerative agriculture, or water safety.

Anima’s vision is clear: to show that, through the art of entrepreneurship, innovation and ecological regeneration can coexist, and that working with nature, rather than against it, is both feasible and profitable.

Conclusion

Anima is a Venture Studio at the intersection of science, entrepreneurship, and sustainability, creating startups that transform biomimicry knowledge into impactful market-ready solutions.

Through Asteria and future ventures, Anima demonstrates how collaboration with the living world can become a strategic and operational reality, inspiring innovation teams to rethink the way they design, build, and create.

Whether you’re a researcher, founder, or investor, Anima is always looking for new collaborators to bring biomimicry to life. Get in touch with them to explore potential synergies.