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11 notable deals and things to know this week (2024 – week #21)

Published on May 22, 2024

Startup news and deals

🇦🇺📲 Agriwebb, an Australian startup, raised $7M for its livestock management software. It helps players alongside the value chain access and share data on the stock and emissions.

🇸🇪🐄 Volta Greentech, a Swedish startup, raised $2.95M for its “next-generation” methane-reducing cattle feed additive. This space is exciting and moving fast: from a handful of companies working on red algae, there is now a wide ecosystem of research, large companies, and startups developing a range of solutions to reduce the impact of animal farming. Also, many large companies support them with experiments (BEL, Mars, General Mills…), which obviously helps drive more funding. However, beyond the current hype, at least three challenges remain:

  • – Price (who pays for the additive, vaccine, or other solution and its eventual impact on milk production)
  • – Scale
  • – Efficiency (lowering methane emissions by 20 to 30% won’t solve our problem).

However, it remains one of the most obvious areas to which investors and leading companies should pay attention.

🇸🇬 🌾 Rize, a Singapore-based startup, raised $14M to make rice cultivation more sustainable through data analytics and precision agriculture techniques.

🇺🇸🍼 ByHeart, an American startup, raised $95M for its infant formula. This is quite an impressive story of a company that built from scratch an end-to-end production capability for a very complex product (and which also benefited from good timing with the shortage of formula in the US).

🇺🇸🍴 Restaurant365, an American startup, raised $175M for its foodservice management software with features ranging from accounting to workforce.

🇨🇭🤖 Mimic, a Swiss startup, raised €2.3M for its robot arms with humanoid hands. They are here to solve the increasing labour shortage in industries such as food service.

🇮🇳🌱 Niqo Robotics, an Indian startup, raised $13M for its spraying technology for agriculture, which aims to reduce the use of chemicals. As for most of the new wave of agriculture robots, it is made to integrate with existing equipment.

🇩🇪🌱 Hexafarms, a German startup, raised €1.3M to make indoor farming more efficient and increase yields through AI.

🇺🇸 🍽 Cheetah, an American startup, raised $14M for its integrated ingredient delivery platform for restaurants.

🇬🇧 🥑 OSY Group, a British startup, raised £750K for its antimicrobial packaging technology that increases the shelf-life of food produce.

Industry news & trends

🌐 📊 A good read on Ultra-processed foods (UPF), where the terminology comes from and the state of science on their potentially harmful effects. One of the most contentious topics is the correlation between chronic diseases (diabetes and also inflammatory diseases) and the consumption of UPF. Is it UPF that causes these conditions, a sub-group, or something else?

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