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12 notable deals and things to know this week (2024 – week #9)

Published on February 28, 2024

🇫🇷 📦 La Fourche, a French online organic e-grocer, raised €2.5M through a crowdfunding platform in 72 hours. This deal shows the strength of the link built with the consumers of this subscription-based platform (clients have to pay a monthly fee to be able to order its low-price organic products). We strongly believe in the potential of this community/subscription-based platform. They are growing in silence (compared to the noise generated by the quick-commerce boom and bust) and may represent the future of groceries.

🇩🇪 🦞 Pacifico Biolabs, a German startup, raised €3.3M for its whole-cut seafood alternatives.

🇦🇪 ☁️ The Cloud, a UAE-based startup, raised $12M for its cloud kitchens. It also acquired Kbox, a British virtual restaurants/cloud kitchens startup.

🇺🇸 🇮🇪 Inspire Brands, the owner of multiple restaurant chains, among which Dunkin’ Donuts, acquired Vromo, an Irish delivery tech startup. Vromo enables restaurants to manage their own delivery fleet.

🇫🇷 🦐 Agriloops, a French startup, raised €13M to develop its aquaponic farm. It will grow 100 tonnes of prawns, fruits and vegetables per year.

⚰️ 🐠 New Wave Foods (USA, shrimp alternatives, $18M raised) and Seafood Ordinary (Germany, tuna, salmon and shrimp), two startups developing plant-based seafood, ceased their operations. Plant-based seafood startups were launched following the hype around plant-based meat. However, as plant-based meat sales stalled after an impressive surge, seafood alternatives never took off.

🇫🇷 🌱 Starfish Bioscience, a French startup, raised €900k to develop predictive models and diagnostic tools to identify beneficial microbes in soil.

🇮🇱🌱 WeedOUT, an Israeli startup, raised $8.1M for its green weeding solutions.

🇺🇸🧬 Trace Genomics, a US startup, raised $10.5M for its revolutionary DNA soil intelligence platform. Through machine learning and genomics, it analyses soil health and disease risk, providing farmers with insights to optimise yields.

🇳🇿🥛 Miruku, a New Zealand-based startup, raised $5M to apply molecular farming to dairy proteins. Molecular farming aims to use plants as bioreactors: the idea is to genetically modify plants to produce the desired proteins through their natural growth, then extract them.

🇨🇳 💉 We often link the use of weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic with the US, but there is another huge market: China. The country has the world’s largest obese population (200 million people), and a grey market to acquire the new GLP-1 drugs has appeared. If the use of these drugs becomes global (and it certainly will, as they’ll lose their patent in a couple of years, opening a race to the bottom in terms of price), we can expect significant consequences for the food industry.

🇳🇱 🌱 Phycom, a Dutch startup, raised €1.75M to scale its technology, enabling high-quality microalgae production.

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