We are thrilled to share that Iknaia Technology has officially been acquired by WellStat. Find out more about this exciting update here.
Magical Mushroom Company
Found Iknaia and Polychord
Launched in 2019, The Magical Mushroom Company® (MMC) grows mycelium-based packaging as a practical and viable alternative to polluting polymers. They often use hemp as a growing medium so the process is incredibly high efficiency and easily replenishable. It has grown from start-up to an ambitious scale-up, producing millions of pieces of packaging for a range of companies across Europe, across multiple production facilities.


While MMC had undertaken some work to try to establish the reasons for certain growing behaviours in its trays of mycelium, it had not undertaken a rigorous monitoring campaign to understand the product and its environment. So long as you have the correct temperature, light and humidity settings in the facility, it is quite incredible how well the mycelium grows without intervention. Nevertheless, MMC identified an opportunity to streamline their scaling plans by gathering data on the growing process and analysing it to perfect its production line.
MMC had engaged the KTN to figure out if there was anything in the Innovate UK family that could support them, and we directed them towards the Net Zero Innovation Exchange pilot. The Innovation Exchange was the right way to go because there was a clear technical problem that needed solving in digital and IoT, areas that MMC was not familiar with. The pilot also offered funding, and this met a key funding gap for them.
Our Solution
KTN ran the challenge for MMC and there was a great response rate, with companies answering the call from all over the IoT and digital sectors. Some had entirely new concepts and some had existing sensors and software that would be applicable for the task at hand. After reviewing many applications and then selecting a shortlist of applicants to come and pitch, Iknaia was selected to provide a version of its Airscan LoRaWAN air quality units, with additional colour sensing added. Iknaia’s existing Airscan units were too big to be placed within the growing pods, so new 3D-printed enclosures were created for this project, together with colour colour-sensing detector.
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Iknaia are a dynamic agile pollution sensing company, who rapidly adapted their existing battery-operated Airscan LoRaWAN air quality device to encompass a colour sensor and meet the project specifications. A new 3D-printed enclosure was designed and manufactured to fit within the confined MMC Trolley. A LoRaWAN network was established within the factory, enabling Airscan devices to operate from any location, sending data back to Iknaia’s cloud services. The initial results proved the correlation between the mycelium growth cycle and the parameters measured, providing early indications of the optimum time to harvest.
Airscan devices within growing environment



