Startup news and deals
🇫🇮🥚 Onego Bio, a Finnish startup, raised $40M for its egg proteins made through precision fermentation.
🇺🇸 🚜 Seso, an American startup, raised $26M for its software that aims to solve US farmer’s HR issues. The platform notably automates visa processes.
🇺🇸🍷Full Glass Wine, an American startup, raised $14M to continue acquiring direct-to-consumer wine marketplaces and subscription platforms. It creates a one-stop-shop experience for everything related to wine and strengthens the multiple platforms’ profitability by unifying their logistics. Beyond this example, we observe a growing number of mergers between small or medium-sized DTC startups (too small to be acquired but too large to be declared a “failure”) with a similar idea to share fixed costs, increase their attractiveness for retailers, and improve their logistics.
🇩🇪🍲 Reduced, a Danish startup, raised €6M for its fermentation technology that upcycles food industry side streams into umami flavours.
🇺🇸🌾 Pollen Systems, an American startup, raised $2.4M for its crop analysis platform, which uses drones to provide data at the level of the individual tree.
🇸🇪🌿 Ironic Biotech, a Swedish startup, raised €1M for its proteins, which enable iron to be easily absorbed into the blood.
🇬🇧🍲 Shicken, a UK startup, raised £4M for its plant-based and Asian-inspired ready-made meals. Beyond providing “substitution” for meat and dairy products, we are convinced that ready-made meals are one of the keys to “unblocking” consumers’ willingness to adopt a more plant-based diet. Indeed, many consumers don’t really know how to cook plant-based foods and can be reassured by such meals.
🇺🇸🌱 BioConsortia, a US-based startup, raised $15M for its bioinputs, enhancing crop yields and agricultural sustainability using microbial solutions.
🇺🇸 🏥 Nourish, a U.S.-based startup raised $35M for its telenutrition platform that connects people with dietitians.
Regulation & public support
🇦🇺 ⚖️ Vow, an Australian cellular agriculture startup, received regulatory approval from Singapore for its cultivated quail. It becomes the third startup to become approved in Singapore, the fourth startup to be approved globally for cellular agriculture, and the first for quail. Unlike other cultivated meat startups, Vow ultimately seeks to create new types of meat.
Industry news & trends
🌎 🚚 Good video on why it is useless to talk about food miles (the distance travelled by food before reaching the consumer) when considering the climate impact of food. And transport is only 5% of the impact of food. So, eating locally grown meat may not be a very efficient way to reduce your climate impact.
🇺🇸 🏪 Do you remember all the hype about Amazon Go stores and their “just walk out” technology, which scans all the items you took alongside your journey into the store to charge you when you leave the store then automatically? It was maybe only hype.
First, Amazon is switching to smart shopping carts and removing this technology. Second, it appears that the tech had a little help: a thousand workers in India reviewed the themes consumers picked up. In 2022, this team had to review about 70% of the sales. That’s another blow to the autonomous store.
🇺🇸 🖥️ Whirlpool is laying off Yummly’s team. It acquired the once-successful recipe app in 2017. Yummly was known for its technology parsing other recipe websites and transforming them into actionable shopping lists with insights on taste, enabling the users to make smart searches. This is also the end of a trend where major appliance makers looked to connect their hardware to consumer-facing content apps (something that never took off).
