💰 Funding news
🇬🇧🌿 Notpla, a UK startup, received a €4M grant from the EU’s Horizon Europe programme to develop plastic-free and compostable coffee cups using its seaweed-based materials.
🇳🇱 💳 Klearly, a Dutch startup, raised $14M in Series A led by PayPal Ventures to expand its restaurant payments platform across Europe.
🇫🇷🌱 Equitable Earth, a French startup, raised €12.6M to become the global standard for nature-based carbon projects through enhanced monitoring, verification, and transparency.
🇦🇺🐄 GrazeMate, an Australian startup, raised $1.2M to develop fully autonomous cattle-moving drones. It enables ranchers to move cattle across large areas using an app without human supervision.
🇺🇸🍄 Om Mushrooms, a US startup, secured $6.5M for its functional mushroom products across supplements, beverages, and plant-based nutrition. There is “something” happening around functional mushrooms with both an increase in consumer curiosity, demand, and a professionalisation of the industry.
🇨🇦🍄 Maia Farms, a Canadian startup, raised C$3.75M to scale oyster mushroom flours and textured mycelium proteins for food applications.
🇫🇷🌾 Mycophyto, a French startup, raised €16M to scale the production of its fungi-based biosolutions for agriculture, which have demonstrated 20% water retention improvement and up to 45% yield increases in vineyards.
🇩🇪🧬 SenseUP, a German startup, raised €3M for its RNA-based biopesticides. This technology enables to intervene precesely with selected genes in pests without damaging the environment.
🇬🇧💡 Bloemteknik, a UK startup, received £2.5M to scale precision LED lighting systems for commercial greenhouses and vertical farms. It autonomously optimises light intensity and spectrum in real-time, hence making vertical farms more efficient, a key element as most players have gone bankrupt due to the rising electricity costs.
🇱🇺🛰️ Hydrosat, a Luxembourg/US startup, raised €51M for its thermal infrared satellite data and AI analytics for agriculture, water management, and defence. Imaging for precision farming is becoming a standard for monitoring water management and also for ensuring crop risks.
🇫🇮 🧀 Mo Foods, a Finnish startup, raised €2.4M for the European expansion of its oat-based cheese alternatives.
🇬🇧🪵 Black Bull Biochar, a UK startup, secured £4M to expand biochar production and open new sites.
🇮🇳📦 Edgistify, an Indian startup, raised $1.4M to expand its e-commerce fulfilment platform across tier-2 and tier-3 Indian cities.
⭐ Acquisitions, regulation, bankruptcies and partnerships
🇸🇪🐟 Hooked Foods, a Swedish startup developing plant-based seafood products, filed for bankruptcy. The Stockholm-based plant-based seafood company generated ~$130K in revenue and ~$580K in losses in its final year, despite retail listings in Sweden and Germany. If things have been complicated for plant-based products in general, they have been even tougher for seafood alternatives: almost all players are now extinct, while in most cases, the taste and texture were ok with processed seafood products, pricing remained much higher and that alone was enough to dissuade consumers.
🇺🇸🥤 Beyond Meat launched Beyond Immerse, a range of sparkling protein beverages (20g plant protein, 60-100 kcal) in three flavours in the US. This seems like a very strange, “Hail Mary-like” move: keeping the same brand, well-known for meat alternatives, doesn’t make sense for entering the already crowded beverage market where it has no legitimacy.
📊 Leading Companies & Macro Trends
🇲🇽🥖 Grupo Bimbo, the world’s largest bakery company, acquired Joy Food International, a Moroccan industrial bread producer. It is its third acquisition in the region in 3 years.
🌾📊 The world has started stockpiling food again, reversing decades of just-in-time global trade reliance. Nations and households are aggressively rebuilding reserves in response to pandemic disruption, increasing geopolitical risk, and climate uncertainty.
💊📈 Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy pill is now broadly available across the US at $149/month for the starting dose. The first oral GLP-1 for weight loss demonstrated about 17% weight loss in trials. This will again broaden the market for GLP-1 drugs and reinforce our prediction that 2026 will be “the” year of mass adoption for GLP-1.
