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12 FoodTech news to know this week (2025 – week #4)

Published on January 22, 2025

Startup news and deals

🇮🇳 🌾 WayCool, an Indian startup, raised $4.4M to scale its farm-to-fork supply chain solutions.

🇫🇷 🌿 Auralip, a French startup, raised €500K to scale up its fermentation technology for hemp seeds.

🇺🇸 💉 Enhanced Medical Nutrition, an American startup, raised $5M for its nutrition products designed to improve recovery outcomes for surgical patients.

🇮🇳 🍌 Beyond Snack, an Indian startup, raised $8.3M to scale its banana chips as a healthy snack alternative.

🇦🇹 🐶 HelloBello, an Austrian startup, raised €4M to grow its brand of freshly-cooked pet food internationally.

🇩🇪 🧀 Formo, a German startup, secured $36M from the EU Investment Bank to scale its alternatives to egg and dairy products (developed through precision fermentation and traditional fermentation).

🇺🇸 💰 Chipotle, the leading TexMex fast-food brand, invests in two startups:

  • Plantible (US), a producer of duckweed
  • CH4 Global (Australia), a developer of a methane-blocker solution for cows

🇫🇷 🇯🇵 Standing Ovation, a French startup using precision fermentation to produce casein, a key dairy protein, announced a partnership with Ajinomoto, a Japanese leading ingredient maker. The partnership will help Standing Ovation to scale its protein production.

🇫🇷🍹 Kuantom, a French startup, raised €5M for its machine that can create personalised cocktails. The machine is intended for hotels and restaurants.

Industry new & trends

🇩🇰 📉 FMC Corporation, an agricultural chemical company has closed its AgTech venture capital arm, FMC Ventures. Opened in 2024, the venture arm made multiple investments. This is yet another negative signal for the AgriFoodTech space, where we observe an increasing trend of leading corporations moving out of investments in early-stage company and instead focusing on partnerships with already well-established startups. This may work, and be even facially impressive for a couple of years, but if everyone only focus on mature startups and stops funding early-stage venture, the pipeline of new innovation will dry quickly.

🇬🇧 🥃 A leading shareholder is divesting from Diageo due to concerns of the impact of GLP-1 on alcohol consumption. Indeed, it seems that many European companies are not yet fully taking the measure of the consequences of the rise of these weight-loss drugs on their business.

🇺🇸 🦣 Colossal Biosciences, raised $200M, to bring back wooly mammoths to life. The ability to bring back to life extinct species could have significant implications on food supply chains but also on the longer term on alternative proteins and our perception of what’s natural or not.

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