🇺🇸 🍽️ Heali, an American startup, raised $3M for its personalised “nutrition therapy” platform to manage health conditions. Unlike most platforms in this category, it focuses on many different conditions, and it has demonstrated its effectiveness in clinical trials.
🇫🇷 🛒 Le Fourgon, a French startup, raised €10M for its plastic-free online supermarket dedicated to beverages. If it follows the steps of Germany’s Flaschenpost (a successful unicorn acquired by Oetker, which operates the same business model), it is definitely a startup to follow. With this funding, it will grow in new locations all over France.
🇺🇸 🍃 Bowery, a US-based vertical farming startup, raised $85M. However, this deal, which comes after layoffs and in a context of serious doubts about the potential of vertical farms ever to generate profits, comes with a valuation axed by 85%.
🇮🇪 🍽️ Positive Carbon, an Irish startup, raised €2.3M to help commercial kitchens reduce food waste. Through sensors, it detects which ingredients or foods go to the bin, providing analytics that can reduce waste (and costs).
🇫🇷 🍏 Ida, a French startup, raised €2.7M for its AI-driven technology to help supermarkets better manage their forecasts, supplies, and orders of fresh foods. This leads to food waste and savings for supermarkets.
🇨🇦 🤖 4AG Robotics, a Canadian startup, raised $17.5M for its mushroom harvesting robots. With it, it addresses labour shortages (the industry is still heavily manual and relies on immigrant workers). With this funding, the startup will commercialise the robots in Canada and Europe.
🇳🇱 🍏 Crisp, a Dutch startup, raised €35M for its farm-to-home online grocery delivery service. Unlike quick-commerce startups, and in order to be profitable, Crisp offers next-day deliveries and focuses on weekly groceries.
🇫🇷 ♻️ Toopi Organics, the French startup recycling human urine into a bio input for organic agriculture, received €8.4M in grants and investment from an EU-related program.
🇮🇹 🛑 Italy has banned lab-grown meat. The law was voted on last week by the parliament and portrays cellular agriculture, insects, and other novel foods as a threat to Italy’s food culture. Let’s say that it will not stop the cellular agriculture industry from moving forward. It may only harm Italy’s foodtech ecosystem.
🇬🇧 🍽️ Appetite, a British startup, raised $2M for its restaurant discovery and booking app. Restaurant booking apps seem to constantly reinvent themselves, even if very few last very long or have a strong business model.
🇪🇸 💻 Last.app, a Spanish startup, raised €5M for its restaurant business operating system, which connects to hundreds of existing services.
