Australia’s first commercial circular economy solutions company, Goterra, has entered voluntary administration after being unable to raise enough capital to scale and operate efficiently. Daniel Walley and Martin Ford from Teneo have been appointed administrators.
In a statement on LinkedIn, Goterra CFO, Daniel Papallo, said the company had spent over a year pitching to hundreds of potential investors in Australia and overseas, but had been unable to raise the money needed in the time they had.
“This was not a charity. We have a clear plan to build a very profitable network business that has global potential. There is a clear customer need – anywhere there are humans producing food waste – and huge revenue potential. You also got 97 per cent off your carbon footprint versus landfill at no extra cost,” Papallo said.
In November last year, the circular economy solutions company opened expressions of interest for an equity raise through OnMarket.
Since it was founded in 2016, the company has used robotic insect farms to turn food waste into organic fertiliser and nutrient-dense protein meal, reducing emissions by up to 97 per cent compared to landfill. It also reduced transport emissions as the waste is handled on-site, reducing the need for multiple waste trucks.
The solution took six years and over $20 million in funding to develop.
The system uses larvae from the Black Soldier Fly to rapidly break down food waste on site and on a large scale. Housed in high-tech, shipping container-sized units called Modular Infrastructure for Biological Services (MIBS) or ‘Maggot Robots’, the larvae can devour vast amounts of food waste, reducing it by 95 per cent in just 24 hours.
The MIBS remove any plastic and cardboard, then grinds the food into a slurry and pumps it into a large feedlot where the maggots get to work. The larvae work 24/7 processing waste. Sensors track temperature, moisture, and waste levels, automatically adjusting conditions to optimise digestion.
Papallo said, “Like all infrastructure, [Goterra] needs scale to operate efficiently and capital to get there. Without that capital, businesses like Goterra will inevitably fail.
The real cautionary tale is that there is a genuine funding gap for all businesses trying to build new ways of doing the hard stuff.”
In 2023, Woolworths became the foundation customer with a Goterra installation in Wetherill Park, Sydney, with the supermarket giant sending food waste not suitable for food relief agencies to the site.
And in March 2025, The City of Sydney (CoS) announced plans to expand its food waste reduction scheme with Goterra, after an initial trial turned around 19,000 kilograms of fertiliser and 6000 kilograms of protein-rich animal feed.
“We had loads of investors willing to support the profitable business. But nowhere near enough to fund the awkward growth phase, even though the risks in front of us were much less scary than the risks that the team had already solved.
“Fundraising should be hard. But when it is impossibly hard, then we miss out on all of the potential that might be created by these next generation businesses.
“I hope that we can salvage something from this experience. Australia has deep pools of capital and some amazing founders. We need to find better ways to connect them together,” Papallo said.
At the time of entering VA, Goterra was operating in six locations across four states.
