💸 Funding News
🍝🇺🇸 Brami, a US startup, raised $33M for its protein pasta. Initially, the startup sold lupini snacks but later switched to pasta (with a mix of lupini and wheat, delivering 21g of protein per serving), and hence surfed the high-protein and non-ultraprocessed food waves.
♻️🇫🇷 Dealinka, a French startup, raised €6.5M to scale its redistribution platform for unsold non-food goods, connecting companies sitting on surplus inventory to a network of 1,200 partner associations.
☀️🇩🇪 Feldwerke, a German startup, raised a €12M (in debt) to deploy 100 MW of solar panels above agricultural land (agriphotovoltaic).
♻️🇺🇸 B-Sides, a US startup, raised $500K for its snacks made from upcycled ingredients from the byproducts of oat milk and corn flour production.
🥚🇺🇸 Stone & Skillet, a US startup, raised $5M for its premium muffins made with spent grain from beer brewing.
🐟🇮🇱 Oshi, an Israeli startup, raised $3M to keep expanding its plant-based fish alternatives in the US (where they grew fourfold in 2025) and in Latin America.
🌱🇮🇳 ONO, an Indian startup, raised $1.2M for its digital lending and post-harvest supply chain financing tools for smallholder farmers.
🌿🇬🇧 QuberTech, a British startup, raised £3.4M to develop natural rubber from engineered dandelions, with the goal to reduce the reliance on imports from Southeast Asia.
🐄🇳🇱 Triple Bio, a Dutch startup, raised €1.5M for its lipid-based feed additive platform, which reduces methane emissions and boosts milk yields in dairy cattle.
🧫🇮🇳 StrainX Bioworks, an Indian startup, raised $13M to scale its fully integrated precision fermentation platform. It already has a 10,000-litre capacity operational, designed to reach 100,000 litres by the end of 2027.
🌾🇩🇰 PerPlant, a Danish startup, raised €1M for its tractor-mounted AI precision spraying system, which decides plant-by-plant what gets sprayed, enabling up to 90% herbicide reduction and 30% fertiliser savings per field pass.
⭐ Acquisitions, Regulation & Bankruptcies
🐔🇮🇹 Amadori, Italy’s leading poultry group, has acquired Unconventional, a plant-based meat alternative brand from Granarolo, an Italian dairy company.
🐄🇺🇸🇦🇺 URUS, a leading US beef and dairy genetics, has acquired AgriWebb, an Australian livestock management and supply chain data platform used by beef and sheep producers across Australia, the US and the UK. Interesting vertical integration of breeding genetics with real-time herd management, traceability and market access data.
🌱🇩🇪 Germany’s Federal Ministry of Research published its High-Tech Agenda Biotechnology Roadmap, formally embedding alternative proteins as a national strategic priority.
🚖🇩🇪 Uber is weighing a higher takeover bid for Delivery Hero after two offers were rebuffed: an initial €33/share (~€10bn), and a second approach at €38/share(~€11.5bn). Uber’s rival DoorDash is also circling and making shareholder enquiries.
📊 Macro Trends
🐣🇺🇸 Colossal Biosciences — the de-extinction company behind the project of “recreating” the woolly mammoth has hatched live chicks from fully artificial eggs (3D-printed plastic shells coated with a silicone membrane that mimics natural oxygen exchange). The immediate application is conservation. Long-term, it could be applied to “de-extinction”.
🥛🇪🇺 Whey protein isolate prices have surged fivefold to €28,000/tonne since 2023, outpacing cheese and butter prices by more than 4×. This is driven by the protein megatrend. European majors Arla and FrieslandCampina are sold out of isolates through June or July. The US, formerly a significant exporter, now consumes virtually all of its domestic production. The structural inversion: cheese, once the primary product of dairy manufacturing, risks becoming the byproduct, while whey becomes the primary value driver. At current price levels, manufacturers may begin substituting cheaper plant proteins.
💊🇺🇸 Eli Lilly’s retatrutide (new GLP-1 molecule targeting 3 weight-loss pathways) delivered unprecedented Phase 3 results, with participants losing an average 28.3% of body weight over 80 weeks, going further than any approved obesity drug to date.
🍽️🇮🇹 Carlo Petrini, founder of the global Slow Food movement, recently died. He launched the movement in 1989 as a direct protest against the opening of Italy’s first McDonald’s in Rome, building it around the principle that food should be “good, clean, and fair”, a philosophy that reshaped how millions think about sourcing, biodiversity and culinary culture.
