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

Published on March 12, 2024

N+1 deals

Startup news and deals

🇦🇺 🌿 Jupiter Ionics, an Australian startup, raised $9M to scale its production of green ammonia. Ammonia is a crucial ingredient for fertilisers, but its current production process emits huge amounts of CO2. That’s why we see a surge in the number of solutions to change the production process and the amounts required in agriculture.

🇪🇸🌱 Mediterranean Algae, a Spanish startup, raised over €1M for its sustainable production of high-quality algae.

🇩🇪 🧪 ProteinDistillery, a German startup, raised €15M for its protein ingredient produced from the biomass fermentation of spent yeast.

🇸🇬🤖 AI Palette, a Singapore-based startup, raised $5.7M for its AI-driven insights platform. It also launches a “FoodGPT” chatbot to help companies accelerate innovation processes.

🇮🇳 🛒 Rozana, an Indian startup, raised $22.5M for its rural e-commerce grocery platform. It is focused on rural India and relies on a network of 18,000 people who operate as last-mile partners. This is an exciting model to follow: will traditional retailers have the time to develop in fast-developing countries, or will they be replaced by agile e-commerce players such as Rozana?

 

🇫🇷🥖 Bene Bono, a French startup, raised €10M for its anti-food waste e-commerce platform. Customers can order a box of groceries (notably ugly produce) that would have been otherwise discarded. The company will use the funds to launch in Spain.

🇺🇸🥓 Umaro Foods, an American startup, raised $3.8M for its plant-based alternative to bacon made with seaweed.

🇺🇸 🐶 PawCo, an American startup, raised $2M for its AI-powered plant-based dog food brand. When a word (here AI) is used to announce that a dog food startup has raised money, you know you have reached “peak buzzword”.

🇫🇷🍏 FoodFlow, a French startup, raised €2M for its B2B fast delivery platform for restaurants.

Industry news & trends

🇰🇷 📺 In April, Disney + will release a Korean thriller series named “Blood Free”, exploring the implications of meat production, notably cultivated meat. I don’t know if this newsletter turning into a TV show review will be for the best, but at least having a K-drama demonstrates that the topic is crossing the chasm between niche and mainstream.

🌏 🌽  Global food prices reached their lowest in three years in February, primarily due to falling cereal prices: the FAO Food Price Index, which monitors five food commodity prices, decreased by 10.5% year-on-year.

🇦🇪 🏭 Novel Foods Group announced plans to build a new $500M biotech hub in the UAE focused on producing sweet proteins (Brazzein) through precision fermentation.

🇺🇸 📉 Good Meat, Eat Just‘s cultivated meat division, announced that it was pausing its plant to develop a large-scale facility in the US. That’s the second company doing so in a month (out of only… two that have regulatory approval in the country). Cellular agriculture companies seem to need more time to refine their tech and validate their ability to scale production profitably.

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