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9 FoodTech news to know this week (2024 – week #47)

🇫🇷🌾 Elicit Plant, a French startup, raised €45M to expand globally its biosolutions which address water stress-reduction technology for crops.

🇺🇸🧬 Shiru, a US-based startup, raised $16M to expand its AI-powered ingredient discovery platform.

🇫🇷🌍 NetZero, a French startup, raised €7M to expand its biochar solutions in Africa. Biochar, produced with organic biomass (such as crop residues) can be used for soil amendment instead of chemical fertilisers. It is also a great carbon sequestration solution.

🇫🇷🌞 UV Boosting, a French startup, raised €6.9M from Kubota, a Japanese agricultural machinery leader, to scale its solution to naturally stimulate plants’ immune systems.

🇺🇸🌱 Happy Plant Protein, a US-based startup, raised €1.8M for its solution dedicated to plant-based products manufacturers. Its technology can enable them to use existing extrusion machines to produce their own plant proteins, hence reducing their dependency on imports.

🇩🇪🌱 Klim, a German startup, raised €22M for its carbon credits platform that supports farmers with tools and incentives to adopt regenerative agricultural practices.

🇫🇷🛒 PimpUp, a French startup, raised €1.8M for its online platform selling “ugly” produce (surplus or imperfect items) at a discount.

🇫🇷🐛 Innovafeed, a French insect protein startup, secured an $11.8M USDA grant to advance insect-based fertiliser production in the US. The use of insect as a fertiliser could be the product that “saves” the whole insect production category.

🇧🇪 🧪 ZymoFix, a Belgian startup, raised €2M for its solution that converts biomass into microbial products for sustainable agriculture.

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