Funding news
🇺🇸 🐞 Vestaron, a US-based startup, raised $20M for its peptide-based bioinsecticide and expand its products in the US and Europe.
🇮🇱 🥩 Aleph Farms, an Israeli startup, raised $29M to scale and commercialize its whole-cut cultivated beef steaks. It says that has modified its core tech to eliminate steps and cut production costs by 97% since 2020, targeting a price of about $14 per pound.
🇮🇱 🧪 Brevel, an Israeli startup, increases by $5M its $25M latest round, for its microalgae protein production.
🇬🇧🥗 The UK-based nutrition-focused brand Field Doctor attracted significant investment to scale its personalized meal offerings targeting health-conscious consumers.
🇫🇷 ☕ French food startup Cherico raised €1M to grow its coffee alternative brand based on chicory.
🇳🇱 🐜 Dutch insect-based protein producer Protix has raised €1M to scale sustainable protein alternatives from insects. It plans to use the funds
🇮🇳🚀 Indian grocery delivery giant Zepto is negotiating a $250M secondary funding round, aimed at strengthening its market position.
🇩🇪 🧬 German startup Differential Bio, emerged from stealth with already €2M raised. The startup aims to enhance the speed at which biomanufacturing processes can be scaled up.
🇮🇹🎶 Italian startup HypeSound raised €1.2M, expanding its technology focused on enhancing bioproduction efficiency through sound, notably microbial growth. As seen with these two deals, there is a growing appetite for solutions that could solve the food bioeconomy’s main challenge: scale. We observe a flurry of solutions, ranging from AI to new bioreactors, to solve two big problems:
- the scale up process: how to scale from small bioreactors (few litres) to large volumes while keeping high levels of productivity?
- the efficiency: at any given scale, how to improve the efficiency (speed and yield) of the bioprocess .
🇮🇳🌾 Indian agri-tech platform Grow Indigo secured $10M to broaden its carbon farming initiatives, promoting sustainable agricultural practices.
Acquisitions, partnerships bankruptcies & regulation
🇺🇸 💥 Plenty, a former vertical farming unicorn (which had raised nearly $1B), filed for bankruptcy.
🇬🇧🇯🇵 Hoxton Farms & Sumitomo partner: UK-based Hoxton Farms, a startup making cultivated animal fat, announced a partnership with Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo to launch its cell-based fat in Asian markets.
🇺🇸 🍓 Oishii acquires Tortuga AgTech: US-based Oishii, known for its high-end indoor-grown strawberries, has acquired the key IP assets and engineering team of Tortuga AgTech, a robotics startup focused on automated harvesting.
🇦🇹 🐁 Austrian startup BioCraft Pet Nutrition gets EU registration to sell its cultivated mouse meat for pet food applications. The process is much less stringent for petfood than for human food and could be the gateway for cellular agriculture applications in Europe.
Leading companies & trends
🇬🇧 Food giants launch UK pilot to de-risk regenerative farming: McDonald’s, McCain Foods, alongside other major food and finance players have teamed up to fund a pilot program helping British farmers adopt regenerative agriculture.
