Startup news and deals
🇬🇧🌿 GrowUp Farms, a British startup, raised £38M for its vertically farmed salads. While it entered the vertical farm game “late” compared to many players, GrowUp appears to be the leading force in Europe, showing that it is possible to scale production.
🇺🇸🥤 Botrista, an American startup, raised $65M for its automated cold beverage machine that can serve a wide range of options, combined with its beverage menu creation tools. Who said automation was dead? Robots are, but easy-to-use automated solutions that can easily increase margins of point-of sales without required additional workforce make a lot of sense.
🇫🇮🥚 Onego Bio, a Finnish startup, raised €14M to scale the production of its egg proteins (ovalbumin) through precision fermentation. It says that a single “full-scale manufacturing unit” would replace six million hens.
🇺🇸🌾 Mitti Labs, an American startup, raised $3M for reducing methane emissions and water usage in rice farming in India. It will help farmers adopt more sustainable practices, whose impact is then measured through satellite imaging. See here our recent insight on rice, its impact (on food security and climate), and why it is one of the most important areas to focus on for decarbonisation.
🇺🇸🧬 Digestiva, an American startup, raised $18.4M to commercialise its protein enzyme platform, which helps design proprietary enzymes to address challenges related to protein absorption.
🇬🇧💊 Bioniq, a British startup, raised $15M for expanding its personalized supplement platform and increasing its market presence in the US and Middle East.
🇦🇺🦠 Biosecurity Commons, an Australian startup, raised $3,5M for its software, which helps predict and manage biosecurity threats to agriculture and the environment.
🇮🇳🌾 Arya.ag, an Indian startup, raised $29M for its digital platform offering post-harvest services, including storage, quality testing, and financing, to grain farmers and agri-businesses.
🇪🇸🧑🌾 Widhoc, a Spanish startup, raised €2M for its precision farming solutions, which help farmers reduce the amount of water they use.
Regulation & public support
🇬🇧 🐶 Meatly, a UK-based startup becomes Europe’s first cellular agriculture company to receive regulatory approval to commercialise cultivated meat… for pets (this is also the world’s first, as the first regulatory approvals were for human food). The first products will be sold in 2025.
🇪🇺 🥩 Don’t be too optimist from the above news and its ability to translate in the EU: the Hungarian presidency of the EU launched an initiative to protect traditional European culinary practices against the rise of novel foods, such as cultivated meat and insect-based products.
🇸🇬 🐜 Singapore approved 16 insects for human consumption.
Industry news & trends
🌍 🧠 Great read on how to raise “the world’s IQ”: one of the main conclusions is that alleviating the challenges of starvation and also providing more nutritional advice on what is right for an infant could be one of the most effective solutions.
🇸🇪 🍄 Mycorena, a Swedish biomass fermentation startup is filing for bankruptcy. Recently it announced that it would not be able to raise money to complete the development of its production facility.
🌍 🍫 As cocaa prices are surging, we could expect that farmers are doing relatively well. That’s not the case at all: Only about 10% of cocoa farmers are earning a living income out of their work. Among many challenges are the small sizes of the farms and low farmgate prices.
🇺🇸 🍔 McDonald’s is attracting a lot of consumers with its promotional $5M meal offering. It’s interesting to observe the current “price war” in the fast food industry with numerous new value meals.
