Introduction
Before Notpla became the company behind an edible, seaweed-based alternative to single-use plastic, used by brands including Lucozade, Decathlon and Just Eat, it spent a full year failing to raise a single pound from venture capital. Pierre Paslier and his co-founder Rodrigo were building something genuinely new, edible packaging shaped like fruit, and found that the investors who claim to champion innovation wanted very traditional funding models and governance structures in return.
When the VC route ran dry, they turned to equity crowdfunding almost as a last resort. In three days, they raised £850,000 from 900 people online. That single decision, born of rejection, ended up defining the unconventional co-CEO structure Notpla still runs on today, on the way to winning the £1 million Earth Shot Prize and replacing tens of millions of single-use plastic items.
From plastics engineer at L'Oréal to questioning everything
Pierre studied a five-year engineering degree in material science in France before taking a job as a plastics packaging engineer at L'Oréal, work he describes as well-paid but personally hollow. The rigid, siloed culture of a large French corporate left little room to challenge how things were done, and he found himself with no real passion for the cosmetics products the plastic was ultimately protecting. Within two years he left to study Innovation Design Engineering at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College, a decision his family initially misunderstood but never opposed.
The idea that looked like a stunt before it looked like a business
Notpla's founding product, Ooho, is a small edible membrane made from seaweed that holds liquid, inspired by the observation that fruit peel can be eaten or safely discarded because nature already knows how to handle that material. It went viral online almost immediately, well before Blue Planet's plastic-in-the-ocean imagery had shifted public consciousness, but investors still treated it as too weird, too unconventional, to back with real capital.
A year of nos, then £850,000 in three days
Pierre is candid that Notpla spent roughly a year fundraising with no success, to the point where his parents were covering his rent and the founders were having genuine conversations about whether the company had reached its natural end point. Equity crowdfunding was not their first choice, it was what remained once traditional routes were exhausted. When they launched the campaign, they raised £850,000 from 900 individual backers in three days. He describes the lesson as formative: rejection did not mean the idea was not working, it meant they had not yet found the right audience for it.
Why the crowdfunding round became a permanent advantage
Because no single investor held a significant stake after the crowdfunding round, Notpla avoided being pushed into a conventional CEO and CTO governance structure for its first eighteen months, giving Pierre and Rodrigo the freedom to prove that a co-CEO model could work before later investors could challenge it. Pierre is pointed about the irony he sees in venture capital: investors present themselves as custodians of innovation while insisting on traditional funding and governance models in return, effectively saying be innovative, but only in the place we're comfortable with.
Winning the Earth Shot Prize and passing a government test no one had passed before
Notpla won the inaugural Earth Shot Prize in the Built World category in 2022, announced live on stage by David Beckham. Pierre describes it as one of two defining validation moments, the other being quieter but arguably more significant: the Dutch government ran an unprecedented investigation into whether Notpla's material could genuinely be marketed as plastic-free, sending samples to independent labs with no established process for the assessment. Notpla passed, becoming, at the time, the only material the taskforce could find that met the standard, a result Pierre says exposed how little genuine scrutiny the wider plastic-free packaging market had faced before.
Inviting in the competition on purpose
Rather than guarding its position, Notpla has helped establish a natural polymers industry group to represent the wider emerging sector, including competitors working with materials like mushrooms and agricultural waste. Pierre's reasoning is straightforward: if Notpla were the only company in the space, that would actually be a bad sign, because it would suggest no one else saw the market as worth pursuing. Genuine competition validates that the opportunity, and the underlying problem, is real.
Staying open to not being the best custodian forever
Asked about Notpla's long-term direction, Pierre is unusually open for a founder: he and Rodrigo see themselves as the best custodians of the company right now, but are genuinely comfortable with the idea that someone else might do a better job of scaling it in future, whether through partnership, acquisition, or eventually stepping back from day-to-day leadership, provided that path delivers more impact than holding onto the position for its own sake.
