💸 Funding News
🧀🇫🇷 Standing Ovation, a French startup, raised €25M to commercialise its casein produced through precision fermentation. The deal notably involves BEL (a French cheesemaker) and Danone.
🤖🇩🇪 Nature Robots, a German startup, raised €4M for its software that makes agricultural machinery autonomous. This kind of retrofitting, which, instead of developing expensive robots, tries to make existing machines act like ones, is one of the most interesting sub-trends of the agriculture automation category.
🥩🇦🇪 CarniStore, a UAE-based startup, raised $12.2M to scale its premium meat e-commerce platform across the Gulf.
🚁🇮🇪 Manna Air Delivery, an Irish startup, raised $50M for its delivery drones. It will launch up to 40 new operational bases in the US.
🌾🇮🇳 CropCoin Technologies, an Indian startup, $1.27M for its farmer services platform providing services like input procurement and crop advisory to smallholder farmers.
🦐🇮🇳 AquaPulse, an Indian startup, raises $2.9M to scale its network of small shrimp aquaculture farmers and provide them with better market access.
💪🇺🇸 Create Wellness, a US startup, raised $20M to expand the retail distribution of its creatine supplement brand. Creatine is probably the “next top ingredient”, which like collagen, is getting out of the gym and entering the life of many consumers.
⭐ Acquisitions & bankruptcies
🌾🇫🇷 Isagri, the French agricultural software group, has acquired Abelio, a French startup that uses drones to reduce input use and help farmers with decision-making.
🫒🇫🇷🇩🇪 SMEY, a Franco-German precision fermentation startup, launched Lipid Atlas, a searchable platform where food and cosmetics companies can find bespoke fermentation-derived oils.
❌🇸🇬 Abillion, the Singapore-based vegan discovery and review platform, has shut down after failing to raise its next funding round. It was at the intersection of complicated trends: the decline in consumer appetite for and funding of plant-based products, and the difficulties that discovery platforms face compared to artificial intelligence.
📊 Leading Companies & Macro Trends
🧬🇧🇷 JBS, a Global meat leader, has opened a $37M cellular agriculture R&D hub in southern Brazil. Interesting signal that among large animal protein companies, many are more than thinking about their future.
🏭🇺🇸 Sysco (B2B delivery to restaurants) announced a $29.1B acquisition of Jetro Restaurant Depot (cash-and-carry in warehouses, mostly targeting independent restaurants), the largest deal in US food distribution ever.
🥜 🇺🇸 🇮🇷 Interesting maps on how California became the world’s largest supplier of pistachios, surpassing Iran. A trend which was boosted by the Dubai chocolate craze and which will probably be amplified by the war in Iran and supply chain issues.
🧬🇺🇸 Biohacking diets are going mainstream, with consumers increasingly using continuous glucose monitors, blood testing without prescriptions, AI nutrition trackers and supplementation to have better control of their health.
