From Fungi to Fashion: How Indonesia’s MYCL is Turning Mushrooms into Leather

Walk through the streets of Bandung — the Javanese city of volcanoes, tea plantations, and a long tradition of creative industry — and you might pass an unassuming building  that is quietly rewriting the rules of global fashion. Inside, workers tend to racks of growing fungal mycelium, cultivated on agricultural waste, that will eventually be harvested, dried, dyed with natural pigments, and shipped to brands across Asia, Europe, and beyond as a leather substitute that harms no animals, uses no toxic chemicals, and generates a fraction of the carbon of conventional hide.

This is MYCL — Mycotech Lab — and it is one of the most interesting sustainability stories to emerge from Southeast Asia in recent years.

Inspired by Tempeh

The company was founded in 2015 by Adi Reza Nugroho, an architecture graduate of the Bandung Institute of Technology. The original idea was simple, and thoroughly Indonesian: if you can bind soybeans into tempeh using fungal mycelium, you could maybe use the same biological mechanism to bind agricultural waste into a durable, leather-like material ?.

Adi Nugroho, who grew up in a village near Bandung in a family with roots in mushroom farming, had already been experimenting with mycology as a business. He and his co-founders had launched Growbox, a do-it-yourself mushroom growing kit, as a way to generate revenue while they researched something more ambitious. “We grew gourmet mushrooms on our farm,” Nugroho has explained. “However, our intention was not to sell them forever but to start our own sustainability-focused startup. So, every time we generated profits in our business, we used the money to research on Mycotech Lab.”

The team worked with the Bandung Institute of Technology, BPPT (Indonesia’s technology assessment agency), Future Cities Laboratory Singapore, and eventually ETH Zürich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, to refine their process. By 2018, they had a viable product. By 2020, they were selling it commercially.

What is Mylea, and Why Does It Matter?

The product MYCL sells is called Mylea™ — a mycelium-based leather alternative grown on sawdust and other agricultural crop waste. The mycelium, the root-like fibrous network of fungi, is cultivated until it forms a dense, interlocking mat. It is then scraped off, dried, and finished using natural dyes extracted from roots, leaves, and food waste from the local region. The result is a material that is waterproof, durable, and texturally close to animal leather — but without the chromium salt tanning , without the cattle feedlots, and without the associated greenhouse gas emissions.

What is perhaps most striking about MYCL is that it has built its client base with virtually no marketing budget — demand has been entirely inbound, driven by the fashion industry’s scramble for credible alternatives to animal and synthetic leather. “This is because leather itself is highly volatile in terms of price and availability,” says Adi. “and people are looking for good alternatives.”

The company is a B2B operation, selling Mylea in sheets to brands and manufacturers who convert it into finished goods: shoes, bags, wallets, watch straps, and car seats.

One of its most notable domestic partnerships is with Brodo (Bro.do), one of Indonesia’s best-known sneaker brands, which is now exploring expansion into Japan on the back of the mushroom leather collaboration. MYCL has also worked with Hyundai and Lexus on eco-friendly car seat applications and participated in Melbourne Fashion Week.

By 2023, MYCL was shipping around 2,000 square feet of Mylea annually to customers — enough to produce approximately 600 pairs of shoes.

The company employs only a few dozen people and operates at a production capacity of roughly 10,000 square feet per year. Adi admits they are still a minnow in terms of the global fashion industry – let alone the car market.

Funding and Global Recognition

MYCL’s journey has attracted serious institutional attention. After an early seed round of USD 20,000 via Kickstarter, the company has attracted a string of investors and has also had help from the Indonesian government and the Philanthropy Asia Summit in Singapore.

Adi Nugroho with the Asia New Zealand Foundation Chief Executive., Suz Jessep / image AMC

In December 2025, MYCL signed a Memorandum of Understanding with PT Pupuk Indonesia, the state-owned fertiliser and petrochemical giant, and the largest fertiliser producer in Asia, to collaborate on nature-based carbon solutions including agroforestry and mangrove restoration — a solid indication that the company is broadening its reach.

The Bigger Picture

MYCL’s advantage is its location: Indonesia is among the most affordable manufacturing environments in the world, it generates vast quantities of agricultural waste (Indonesia currently converts only 1 per cent of agricultural waste into compost), and it sits at the centre of a region where mushroom cultivation is already deeply embedded in food culture.

The scaling challenge, however, is real. To serve even a single mid-sized fashion brand at commercial volumes, MYCL would need to grow production massively from current levels. The capital and time required to build that infrastructure is the “valley of death” that Nugroho himself has identified as the company’s central challenge — bridging the gap between a proven, scientifically validated product and the manufacturing scale to effectively break into the global market.

That issue was one of a few that recently brought Adi to Wellington, hosted by the Asia New Zealand Foundation. He also made a quick visit to Waikanae on the Kapiti Coast where local artist Charlotte Crichton is currently running an exhibition at the Toi Mahara Gallery, with artworks made from MYCL’s products.

The ambition of Adi and his company is easy to see, and the question is no longer whether mycelium-based alternatives can work. MYCL has already answered that. The question now is whether they can scale up fast enough to matter — and whether the global fashion industry may have an appetite to help fund that expanding enterprise.

Adi Nugroho joins us on the Asia Insight Podcast - listen here.

Asia Media Centre