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- FoodTech Weekly #222 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #222 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
November 15, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #222
Hi there,
Spent the start of the week in Malmo (🇸🇪) for FoodTech Forum 2024. Wrote a bit about it here. In essence, there were 600 attendees, maybe 40 exhibitors showcasing the latest in food and bev (I ate my way to that exhibition like a machine), a couple of intriguing keynotes, and a Company of the Year Award, where I had the honor of being a jury member. We ended up giving the award to DiaPure, which has developed a solution to capture (the finite resource) phosphorus from e.g. wetlands, agriculture, and wastewater, so it can be reused as fertilizer. Adding a a couple of event snapshots below.
Early next week I’ll be in Helsinki (🇫🇮) for TONIC Food Business Summit (I’ll be on stage for a panel on decarbonizing the food system), so if you’re going, I’ll see you there. I’m currently brushing up on my Finnish. Repeat after me:
Äteritsiputeritsipuolilautatsijänkä (a region in Finnish Lapland)
Hyppytyynytyydytys (meaning ‘bouncy cushion satisfaction’)
Juoksentelisinkohan (meaning ‘Should I run around aimlessly?’ — which is coincidentally what I keep asking myself in life).
📸 Anja Leissner / FoodTech Innovation Network / me / etc
This week's rundown:
🚜 NitroVolt drums up €3.5M for green ammonia to decarbonize farming
🚰 Solaq clinches €1.4M for solar powered air-to-water technology
🎢 The world's only indoor office roller coaster opens in Sweden
Let's go!
💰 Funding
🇩🇪 Klim has closed a $22M Series A round, led by BNP Paribas and joined by e.g. AgFunder, Earthshot Ventures, Elevator Ventures, and Rabobank. The company gives farmers the tools to plan, execute, and finance the transition to regenerative farming, track their progress, and prove it to supply chain partners in order to earn revenue payouts for sequestered carbon.(I interviewed Klim’s cofounder Dr. Robert Gerlach back in 2020 when the company had just raised $200K and was still called Carbon Farmed.)
🇺🇸 Shiru has raised a $16M Series B led by S2G Ventures and backed by e.g. CPT Capital and Nourish Ventures. They company has built what it says is a first-of-its-kind discovery platform and marketplace for proteins called ProteinDiscovery.ai which helps companies identify and test various types of proteins (the database contains 33M+ molecules that can be filtered by protein sequence, functional use, and successful expression).
🇩🇰 NitroVolt has harvested €3.5M (appr. $3.7M) in Seed funding from investors incl. Backing Minds, EIFO, EQT Foundation, Satgana, and DivisionM. The company develops a method to decentrally produce sustainable green ammonia to help decarbonize farming.
🇩🇪 Feld.energy, which empowers farmers to use their land for a combination of agriculture and electricity generation using PV solar, has scored €1.7M (appr. $1.8M) in preseed funding led by HV Capital and joined by e.g. Angel Invest, CoInvest, and a bunch of angel investors.
🇫🇮 Happy Plant Protein, a spinout from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, has bagged €1.8M (appr. $1.9M) in a round led by Nordic FoodTech VC and joined by Butterfly Ventures, as well as a grant from Business Finland. Happy Plant Protein’s technology allows for the production of high-quality plant proteins with existing extrusion machinery, avoiding the need to establish expensive dedicated facilities.
Pekka Lehtinen, Elli Laukkala, Jari Karlsson / Happy Plant Protein
🇩🇪 Oceanloop has reeled in €35M (appr. $37M) in an European Investment Bank loan to expand in Germany and Spain. The company does indoor farming (RAS) of shrimp and fish.
🇬🇧 ZELP, which develops a low-cost, cattle wearable technology to mitigate methane emissions, has received a $4.9M grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation aimed at accelerating validation of ZELP’s cattle methane mitigation device.
🇧🇪 Aphea.Bio has landed €1.9M (appr. $2M) from VLAIO (the Flemish Agency for Innovation & Entrepreneurship), for its its biostimulant INITIA that improves nutrient uptake efficiency (of nitrogen and phosphorus in particular), resulting in better grain yields and reduced reliance on chemical fertilizer (h/t Better Bioeconomy). VLAIO also recently invested €1.2M (appr. $1.3M) in Protealis (🇧🇪), whose UpCoat soy seed coating technology applies nitrogen-fixing bacteria to soybean seeds, thus enhancing yields and reducing the reliance on synthetic fertilizer (h/t FoodHack)
🇧🇪 Zymofix has pulled in €2M (appr $2.1M) from e.g. High-Tech Gründerfonds, The NEST Family Office and VP Capital. The company produces beneficial microorganisms by fermenting biomass waste. The microorganisms then improve soil health, boost crop productivity, and reduce environmental impact.
🇳🇱 Solaq has secured €1.4M (appr. $1.5M) in preseed from Connect the Drops and Netherlands Enabling Watertechnology Fund, plus subsidies from RVO and the Province of Noord-Holland. The startup has developed a solar-powered technology that uses heat instead of electricity to produce water. This allows water to be extracted from the air, off-grid, 24/7, even in dry places like deserts.
Solaq
🎙️ Investment Climate: Anik Thaler of Fabas Foods shares how to get funded in 2024
This week, Alex Shandrovsky spoke to Anik Thaler of Fabas Foods (episode available on Spotify and Apple). Fabas develops ingredient systems for dairy alternatives (bringing more beans onto our fields and plates), and recently closed a CHF 1.3M (appr. $1.5M) Seed round led by a Swiss family office and some corporate investors.
Top three findings from this conversation:
Cold Outreach does not work especially when trying to get into Family Offices. When being asked if she ever heard of a family office in the past or already knew them and were only looking for a warm introduction, Anik answered ‘No, that's the thing with the family office. Normally they are not that present in public compared to VCs who normally have websites and have LinkedIn profiles. So most family offices don't have that. You need to know some people who already know them, which makes it much harder actually to access those.’
Be prepared to pivot. ‘Since we raised our first CLA [convertible loan agreement], what we then called preseed, we've been focused on building a B2C brand. So we started with a portfolio of B2C products. We made some hummus products, some burgers, and falafel. Always with the vision to bring more pulses onto our plates, but then we quickly realized that it's not just about launching new products to the market and having maybe a bit nicer taste with more locally produced products, but to rather really improve them. There we saw that the ingredients that are currently used are one of the biggest challenges to overcome. So that's when we started to focus more on ingredient development ourselves and then pivot towards becoming a B2B ingredient supplier’.
Speed to market is key in today's environment. ‘Our technology is based around extraction and fermentation, but we work with pulses, meaning fava beans, peas, chickpeas. All those sources are not novel food and the process itself isn’t either, which makes it much easier to access the market quickly.’
🧐 Noteworthy
📖 Gullspång Re:food launched a report, Food is Investable, which is worth reading.
🏜️ Should we be farming in the desert?
📈 AgTech deal values have increased for two consecutive quarters, indicating that the sector might start to rebound, Pitchbook observes.
💶 Pymwymic has closed its €71.5M Healthy Food Systems Impact Fund II, backed by 250 private and seven institutional investors incl. Invest-NL, Oost NL, and AGCO, to support AgriFood companies working in e.g. sustainable farming, food waste reduction, and regenerative agriculture.
🏬 IKEA has opened its first standalone restaurant in the U.K, on King Street in Hammersmith. It seats 75 people and serves the usual range of Swedish dishes.
🌍 News from the FoodTech Weekly community
👨🏻💻 Volta Greentech (Sweden/remote) is hiring a Commercial Director, Europe.
🏆 What if farmers were recognized like chefs? Every year Top 50 Farmers celebrates and empowers 50 outstanding farms practicing or transitioning to regenerative agriculture. Benefits of the program include access to new markets, financing, mentorships and peer-to-peer networks. If you’re a farmer, apply directly here. Do you know a dedicated farmer? Nominate them here.
💵 Automated freight forwarding and SaaS platform Transship is designed specifically for shipments of perishable goods such as food as well as non-perishable goods, as it enables end-to-end tracking of e.g. GPS, temperature, humidity, motion, and tampering. Since 2022, the company has doubled its revenue to $1.2M, increased the number of annual shipments by 3x to 450+, and become EBITA profitable (2024). Transship has opened its Seed round, and investors can reach out to Transship CEO Amit Hasak via email.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
🎲 Random Stuff
🥖 Hackers are threatening to spill 40 GB of sensitive data they’ve stolen from Schneider Electric in France, unless the company pays (checking my notes) a ransom of $125K worth of baguettes (this feels very on-brand for France.)
🎢 A creative studio in Stockholm, Sweden has built a 60 meter (200 ft.) $150K indoor rollercoaster called The Frontal Lobe in its office (registering the coaster with city officials as ‘an interior design object’). I want this. I need this.
The Frontal Lobe
I love you.
Daniel
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🎵 This issue was produced while listening to Comme d’habitude by Claude François
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