💸 Funding news
🇺🇸 🥣 Oats Overnights, a US startup secured $45 M to expand its ready-to-eat oatmeal products. The company has already surpassed $200M in 2025 with hundreds of thousands of meals sold each month. This is again an impressive DTC story.
🇬🇧 🥛 Modern Milkman, a British startup, raised £10 M to scale its doorstep delivery service of refillable groceries.
🇺🇸 🍴 Curate, a US software startup, raised $10 M to expand its hospitality platform, enabling mobile ordering and loyalty programs.
🇬🇧 🍲 HomeCooks, a UK startup, secured €1.6 M to grow its platform offering home‑cooked meals by independent chefs. This model, which is already working quite well in some parts of the world enables a combination of flexibility, personalisation that more centralised platforms can’t match (while offering revenue diversification to chefs).
🇺🇸 🌾 Heritable Agriculture won a $5 M Gates Foundation grant to advance AI‑driven climate‑resilient crops.
🇬🇧 🍬 Milliways, a UK plastic‑free chewing gum brand, raised $3 M for its US expansion.
🇳🇱 🌿 Proba, a Dutch startup, raised €1.25 M for its Scope 3 certification program, which converts fertiliser reduction into carbon credits alongside the food supply chain.
🇫🇷 🦢 Aviwell, a French biotech, raised €11 M to scale its microbiome health platform dedicated to poultry and aquaculture nutrition.
🇩🇪 🥚 Orbem, a German deep‑tech startup, raised €55.5 M for its MRI technology used to determine sex inside eggs and reduce waste in hatcheries.
🇫🇮 🧪 Solar Foods, a Finnish startup, raised €25M, through the emissions of new shares on the public market. The startup uses biomass fermentation to “convert” captured carbon dioxide into a source of protein. The funding will support its first large-scale production facility.
🇺🇸🦠 Barnwell Bio, a US startup, raised $6M to scale its biosurveillance solutions for poultry barns.
🇺🇸🌱 Spearhead Bio, a US startup, raised $4M to commercialise its gene-editing technology for crops. It enables precise, seamless gene insertion without foreign DNA, enabling corn varieties to respond to emerging threats in months rather than years.
⭐ Acquisitions, exits & partnerships
🇳🇱🥔 EW Group acquired a majority stake in Solynta, a Dutch startup, as part of a funding round to accelerate the commercialisation of Solynta’s hybrid potato breeding platform. It aims at increasing breeding speed while reducing required inputs.
🇺🇸🍼Once Upon a Farm, a US company co-founded by Jennifer Garner, filed for IPO targeting $764M valuation and seeking $209M by offering 11M shares priced at $17-19. The Berkeley-based organic children’s food brand reached $225.9M revenue (12 months ending Sept 2025) with 64% CAGR since 2018, but remains unprofitable.
🎥 🍖 Upside Food, a US-based cultivated meat startup, was featured in a Mr Beast Youtube video. Will the YouTuber (most watched globally) contribute to making cellular agriculture more well-known and accepted by consumers?
📊 Leading Companies & Macro Trends
🇺🇸 🛒 Amazon is shutting down all 72 Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores in the US, citing inability to create “truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion.” The company will focus on Whole Foods Market and same-day grocery delivery services instead. As shown in our recent AgriFoodTech trends report, smart stores are very much at the bottom of the disillusionment pit.
🧬🧓 A new report shows that genetic factors play a major role in longevity, with lifestyle, environment, and healthcare access explaining limited lifespan variation. New research suggests genetics accounts for 50%+ of longevity rather than 10-25% as older studies claimed. Don’t be depressed and keep going to the gym, though: if your lifestyle choices can’t make you a centenarian alone, they could give you about 5 more years, and more importantly, make your last decade(s) much more enjoyable.
🇺🇸🧪 Tufts University’s Centre for Cellular Agriculture received a new grant to build an innovation hub for future foods, supporting startups and research in cultivated meat and alternative proteins.
