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- FoodTech Weekly #228 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #228 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
January 10, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #228
Hi there,
Welcome to the New Year! I hope you’ve had a relaxing holiday break, spending time with people you care about. Let’s make 2025 great, because it’s up to us to build the future we want to see.
From this issue forward, free subscribers will start seeing ads in the newsletter. As the old saying says: If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. But to be frank, these ads will help offset my costs of running FoodTech Weekly (as full access to Beehiiv, certain databases and newsletters, travel and events amount to thousands of dollars annually). Some ads pay per 1,000 views, others per clicks. To some extent, I can control the type of ads running. But if you want to get rid of them, just upgrade to Premium.
This week's rundown:
🌱 Inari bags $144M for next-gen seeds that require less water, and boost yields
🚜 Moonrider raises $2.2M for electric tractors sold at price parity with diesel tractors
🚰 Chromafora draws in appr. $23M for tech that removes heavy metals from water
Let's go!
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💰 Funding
🇺🇸 Inari has scored a $144M Series G from e.g. NGS Super and the State of Michigan Retirement System; the company uses AI to speed up plant breeding and gene editing to create high-yielding, climate resilient seeds for commodity crops such as soy, corn and wheat. The company says its seeds require less water and fertilizer, and boost crop yields as much as 20%.
🇮🇩 HiFeed has banked a pre-seed round (sum undisclosed) from Wavemaker Impact. The company makes easy-to-digest cattle feed pellets that reduce enteric fermentation, the process that produces methane in livestock.
🇮🇳 Moonrider has closed a $2.2M Seed round from AdvantEdge Founders and Micelio Technology Fund. Founded in 2023, the company develops heavy-duty electric tractors, sold at price parity with diesel-powered tractors, aiming to save farmers costs by eliminating the need to buy diesel fuel.
🇮🇱 Fermata has harvested $10M in Series A funding from Raw Ventures. The startup develops AI-powered decision-support systems for precise plant monitoring in greenhouses and indoor farms (e.g. automatically discovering pests and diseases at the earliest stages).
🇳🇱 Odd.Bot, which builds autonomous agricultural robots, has bagged €2M (appr. $2M) in pre-Series A funding, led by Iconic Ventures and joined by e.g. Polka Capital Management and Horizon. Here’s a short video of their Weed Whacko robot in action.
OddBot
🇬🇧 New Wave Biotech has raised €1.2M (appr. $1.2M) from investors incl. Innovate UK and EIT Food. The company does bioprocess simulation software, meaning they can help food companies predict the output, costs, and sustainability impacts of their food production processes.
🏴 Kaly, which grows seaweed, has reeled in £300K (appr. $370K) in funding led by Tricapital Angels and Scottish Enterprise.
🇸🇪 Chromafora, a water treatment startup able to remove heavy metals from water, has secured €22.5M (appr. $23M) in debt funding from the European Investment Bank.
🇺🇸 Amogy has reached $11.2M of its targeted $90M round. The company produces green ammonia, aiming to provide fuels to various transportation markets from agriculture (e.g. farm tractors) to maritime and long-haul trucking.
🎙️ Investment Climate: Jan Rune Nordhagen of Vestland Pharma and Jon Berg, Partier of Sarsia, on how to get funded in 2025
This week, Alex Shandrovsky chatted with Jan Rune Nordhagen, CEO of Vestland Pharma, and Jon Berg, Partner of Sarsia. Vestland Pharma is a startup that is focusing and wants to make the first all-natural medicine against sea lice - the biggest problem for fish farming in Norway. The company recently raised NOK 12M (appr. $1M) from Sarsia and Coast Seafood. Jan highlighted the pivotal role of external partners in structuring the company and aligning it with market demands. The discussion also emphasizes the importance of government grants, like those from Innovation Norway, in funding high-risk, environmentally friendly projects. On the other hand, Jon Berg opened the conversation that underscores how venture capitalists are now prioritizing solutions that integrate into current systems rather than completely replacing them. The entire conversation can be found on Spotify and Apple.
Top three findings from this conversation:
Your initial target investors are often wrong. “ We tried to get investment from fish farmers in Norway and they have quite a lot of capital, but they did not know and did not grasp what we tried to do. When you are into fish farming, you usually invest in low-risk projects, and making medicine is highly risky. It is cost intensive and it has a high risk. I think we did try to reach out to the wrong investors, basically, the first time”, Jan shared.
Strategic Government Grants Accelerate High-Risk Projects. Government support, such as grants, plays a pivotal role in funding innovative but risky projects, helping mitigate financial risks for investors. As per Jan, “It was Innovation Norway. They give grants to good ideas that are helping the industry, and you need to show it’s helpful and does not harm the environment. These are grants, not equity, and they’re very useful for slightly higher-risk projects.”
Evolving VC Trends: From Replacement to Sustainability. The focus of venture capital has shifted from disrupting supply chains to improving sustainability and efficiency within existing frameworks. As venture partner of Sarsia, John Berg said that, " Three to four years ago, the emphasis was on replacing existing farming infrastructure with plant-based products or cellular agriculture. Now, it’s much more about embracing current supply chains and making them sustainable and regenerative.”
🧐 Noteworthy
📌 Oatly is closing its Singapore production facility as part of its global ‘asset-light’ strategy which streamlines operations at a time of mounting losses. The factory had been operational for three years.
❄️ Tomorrow of Seattle has unveiled a new refrigerator, the Tomorrow Fridge, which is designed to better preserve fresh produce by adjusting the fridge storage environment. The fridge will also feature overhead cameras to monitor inventory and help households plan meals, as well as notifying users of what’s running low.
💶 Nordic FoodTech VC is launching it’s second fund, targeting a €80M size. It’s Fund I has invested in the Nordics and Baltics, backing startups like e.g. Chromologics, Enifer, Melt&Marble, Äio, Tracegrow, Endless, and Ironic Biotech (full disclosure: I’m an advisor to Nordic FoodTech VC).
💸 Households with at least one GLP-1 (weight loss drug) user cut their grocery spending by about 6% within six months of taking the medication, a new Cornell University and Numerator study shows. For high-income households, the spending cut was almost 9%. Purchases of calorie-dense, processed items such as chips, cookies, and baked goods were most affected. Nearly 15M U.S. adults now take GLP/1 medications.
🛑 Plenty has closed its flagship indoor vertical farm in Compton, California, as part of a strategic shift toward strawberry production. On this topic, Rhishi Pethe just wrote an excellent article titled “Is Plenty (& vertical farming) the Juicero of agriculture?”. He summarized his reflections in this decision tree:
🤑 The Novo Nordisk Foundation is making a €134.1M (appr. $138M) grant to establish the Biotechnology Research Institute for Green Transition (BRIGHT) in Denmark, housed at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). BRIGHT will focus on developing scalable biosolutions in microbial foods, microorganisms for net-zero agriculture, and sustainable materials.
🫰 Stockholm University has been awarded a SEK 60M (appr. $5.4M) grant to build PLATE, a new transdisciplinary research center focused on the role of the foodservice sector in driving sustainability, building preparedness and resilience, and contributing to competitive businesses. PLATE will be housed at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and will focus on meals rather than systems.
🪦 Bayer and Trendlines have dissolved their AgTech fund ahead of time. Shane Thomas notes that this trend is set to continue; the number of mainstream VC firms have tripled in 15 years, but there’s been a lack of distributions (return on investment going back to limited partners), coupled with a slowdown in M&A and a dry spell for IPOs. For AgTech specifically, there have been few (and relatively small) startup exits, so VC firms will struggle to raise new funds.
🌍 News from the FoodTech Weekly community
👨🏻💻 Volta Greentech (🇸🇪) is hiring a Commercial Director and a Technical Project Manager... The Future is Fungi Award (🇸🇪) is looking for a Chief Operating Officer… Foreverland Food (🇮🇹) is recruiting a Product Development Lead… Revo Foods (🇦🇹) is on the hunt for a Sales Manager…Nosh.bio (🇩🇪) seeks a Senior Finance Manager… NitroCapt (🇸🇪) has an open role for a Senior Material Specialist in High Temperature Ceramics… The Rockefeller Foundation (🇺🇸) has opened the application for a Summer Associate, Regenerative Agriculture.
🎤 On Feb 6, 2025, Cranfield University is hosting an event focused on driving digital transformation in food supply chains. More info here.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
🎲 Random Stuff
🌍 Your occasional reminder that the world is actually becoming better in many ways:
🍷 Consumption in red wine in France has fallen by about 90% since the 1970s.
🐚 The oldest individual animal known to science is a 500+ year old Arctica islandica clam from Iceland. The record for the oldest known lifespan of all vertebrate species is held by the Greenland shark, with an estimated lifespan of at least 272 years.
🤔 PlasticList, a project that lists quantifiable amounts of plastics contained by specific foods consumed, found that 86% of the foods tested have plastic chemicals (h/t Nordic9).
I love you.
Daniel
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🎵 This issue was produced while listening to Comment te dire adieu by Françoise Hardy.
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