A French biotechnology company whose fermentation-derived dye can halve the carbon footprint of dyeing a pair of jeans has taken the Special Prize at the prestigious ANDAM Innovation Awards, signalling growing industry conviction that bio-based colorants are ready to move from the laboratory to the mainstream.
Pili, founded in 2015 and headquartered in Toulouse, received the recognition at the 2026 edition of the ANDAM Fashion Innovation Prize, where an expert committee convened on May 20 at the Institut Français de la Mode in Paris. The main prize and its €100,000 grant went to AI-powered retail analytics platform Alphalyr, but the jury issued its second-ever Special Prize to Pili in recognition of what it called a “concrete, scalable alternative to the petrochemical colorants that have long defined fashion’s dyeing industry.”
The award arrives at a pivotal moment for a company that has spent over a decade and more than €30 million building technology capable of replacing one of the most chemically intensive inputs in global fashion. The textile manufacturing industry consumes approximately 1.3 to 2 million tons of dyes annually, and 99 percent of all colorants currently rely on fossil resources.
Conventional indigo — the blue that defines the world’s estimated three billion pairs of jeans sold each year — is no exception. Its production involves aniline, a known human carcinogen, and other toxic chemicals such as hydrogen cyanide, posing risks to factory workers and aquatic ecosystems through residual chemicals in dyeing and washing processes.
Pili’s answer is Eco-Indigo, a product that swaps petroleum for sugar. The company genetically engineers bacteria to produce the desired pigments, cultivates them in large fermentation tanks fed with carbon feedstocks such as sugar, then separates the dye through a straightforward filtration process — requiring no fossil fuels and generating no harmful by-products.
The raw materials are agricultural by-products, specifically molasses and starch-based sugars derived from the non-edible fraction of crops, meaning the process does not compete with food supply chains. Compared to classic petrochemical dyes, Pili’s microorganisms produce the same amount of dye without petroleum or synthetic chemicals, and require just one-fifth of the usual water amount while growing at room temperature.
The environmental gains are quantifiable. Pili’s method cuts CO₂ emissions by up to 50 percent compared to traditional indigo dyeing processes, a figure backed by standardised Life Cycle Assessments that the company embeds into all product development. Performance, meanwhile, is not compromised: the product achieves greater than 90 percent purity and matches synthetic indigo on both shade and colorfastness — the two metrics that have historically made plant-based and bio-derived dyes commercially unworkable at scale.
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Scale has been Pili’s most critical proof point. In 2024, the company produced its first tons of bio-based indigo, enabling the creation of tens of thousands of sustainable denim pieces — a milestone that transformed the technology from a promising R&D project into a commercially viable industrial process.
The first products reached consumers in January 2025 through the spring collections of Citizens of Humanity and its sister brand Agolde, debuting exclusively on Net-A-Porter before rolling out to the brands’ own websites and other global retailers. The three-way partnership also includes Orta, the Turkish denim mill responsible for weaving and processing the fabric.
“Our partnership with Pili represents a pivotal moment in our industry’s journey towards a more regenerative future,” said Amy Williams, CEO of Citizens of Humanity Group, adding that the collaboration addresses the urgent need for innovation given the textile sector’s massive annual dye consumption.
The commercial launch was made possible by sustained investment. Pili raised $15.8 million in Series A funding in early 2023, led by Bpifrance’s Ecotechnologies 2 fund with participation from Famille C Participations and existing investor Elaia Partners, bringing total investment since the company’s founding to over $32 million. At the time of the funding round, Pili had already secured several million euros in pre-orders across the textile, ink, and paints sectors, underlining demand well beyond denim.
That broader ambition is central to Pili’s pitch to investors and partners. The company is simultaneously targeting inks, polymers, paints, and coatings — sectors where petrochemical colorants face the same regulatory and sustainability pressures as in fashion. The global bio-based pigments and dyes market was valued at $32.7 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $48.8 billion by 2034, growing at a compound annual rate of 4.2 percent.
For ANDAM, the decision to create a second Special Prize for Pili reflects a wider shift in the award’s own priorities. “We have discovered a real maturity and diversity in the new materials on offer, with an increasingly sophisticated consideration of ecological issues, particularly water and carbon consumption,” said Yann Gozlan, founder and president of Creative Valley, who sat on the expert committee.
Pili framed the recognition as confirmation of a broader industry inflection point, stating that bio-based dyes are “no longer a niche — they are becoming a new standard.” For an industry that has relied on the same petrochemical synthesis route since Adolf von Baeyer first decoded indigo’s molecular structure in 1867, that shift, if it holds, would represent one of fashion’s most significant material transitions in over a century.
