Following the recent publication of DigitalFoodLab’s report on the trends shaping the future of food, today we’ll focus on the state of funding for FoodTech to see how much money is being poured into all these trends and, notably, if there are signs of things getting better. We’ll cover the trends and the future of funding in our upcoming webinar on the 13th of February. You can register here.
Also, we recently published a report on AgriFoodTech funding (ending at H1 2024). Below, we can see the update for the other half of the year. In a word, things are stable, neither better nor worse. If we want to be optimistic, we can even see some good news in the relatively good level of funding for the last quarter: traditionally, the last quarter of the election year in the US is quite bad as investors wait for additional clarity before committing large amounts of money.
As you can see, the level of funding for 2024 is almost stable, with only a 6% decline compared to 2023. After years of steep decline, that is a welcome respite. Also, very large deals are still here, with two companies raising around $1B each during 2024.
All geographies are not performing equally. Europe is absorbing more than half of the remaining decline in funding, and most of its significant funding (as you can observe in the top deals) is going towards grocery delivery. After years of over-performing, the old continent’s ecosystem is now going through a rough patch with few signals indicating that things could improve in the short term.
On the opposite, the ecosystems in the US and Asia (focused on delivery as usual, but also beyond, which is new) are doing quite well.
