🇸🇪 🥛 Oatly, the Swedish oat milk company, secured $425M in funding ($300M in convertible notes and a $125M loan credit agreement). Oatly has been publicly traded since 2021 but keeps publishing losses quarter after quarter, and its shares sank until this deal’s announcement.
🇮🇱 🥔 PoLoPo, an Israeli startup, raised $1.75M using potatoes for its molecular farming technology. Basically, molecular farming is about replicating a protein (here egg proteins) using a genetically engineered plant (here potatoes) to make it grow as a “natural bioreactor”.
🇺🇸 🍗 Good meat (a subsidiary of Eat Just) was the second cellular agriculture company to receive a “no questions” clearance from the FDA (the US food safety regulatory body) for its chicken products. It was also the first in the world to receive approval, this time in Singapore in 2020. The startup expects to start tastings in restaurants later this year.
🇬🇧 🥜 Oja, a UK-based ethnic marketplace, raised an undisclosed amount of money from Chelsea football player Raheem Sterling. The startup delivers products from African and Caribbean origins within 24 hours.
🇬🇧 🥩 Nestlé is removing its Garden Gourmet (plant-based meat) and Wunda (alternative dairy) from the UK and Ireland stores. As plant-based sales went stale last year, this can be seen as another blow to the sector. Consolidation and better products will be required to reach profitability and restart growth.
🇺🇸 🌱 🦠 Andes, a US-based startup, raised $30M to turn farmland into carbon sinks. It leverages microorganisms that live in the soil, converts CO2 into minerals, and reduces greenhouse gasses.
Similarly, Windfall Bio, also US-based, raised $9M for its enzymes that eat methane and capture nitrogen from the air to make fertilizer for the farms.
🇪🇸 🧫 Cocoon Bioscience, a Spanish startup, raised €15M for its speciality enzymes for industrial biotech processes and growth factors for alternative protein production. It will build a production facility in Bilbao which will be operational in 2024.
🇳🇱 📦 OneThird, a Duch startup, raised €2.75M for its AI-based tech that scans food and predicts the shelf life of different types of produce.
🇸🇪 🚴♂️ Mathem, a Swedish “new retailer” startup, is acquiring its quick-commerce counterpart Kavall.
🇬🇧 🧃 BACX, a UK-based energy drink, raised £1.2M from multiple investors, among which Sebastian Vettel, the former Formula One driver. As we’ve seen in a previous insight, investments in beverage brands have risen exponentially in Europe over the past years.
