We are entering the last (often the busiest, at least for DigitalFoodLab) quarter of the year. We can now have a good idea of where the year will land and make some smart guesses for next year. For that, let’s have a look at what has happened for the AgriFoodTech ecosystem in Q3 2024 with the:
- State of investments globally and top deals
- Focus on Europe
- DigitalFoodLab’s FoodTech index looks at how the publicly traded startups are doing compared to the overall market
1 – State of investments for Q3 2024 & Top deals
Last month, we released our new report on the state of Global FoodTech investments. Compared to 2023, the first half of the year saw a small bounce back. Now, where are things going for the third quarter of the year?
As you can see above, investments have remained at their now usual plateau of about $3B per quarter. We don’t expect anything different for the last quarter of the year.
As shown in our last report, investments in 2024 are still massively driven by large deals. Almost 50% of the quarter investments are due to the 10 top deals listed below. We still observe a worryingly low level of seed and series A deals.
On a more positive note, the distribution of top deals maybe the most diverse we have seen in the past couple of years with companies from all over the world, notably two countries which are not often present there: Brazil and Japan. While, its has been known fro some time that there is an active AgTech ecosystem in Brazil, we know see startups developing in other areas. As for Japan, it is now home of an interesting (while still emerging) ecosystem.
2 – Focus on Europe
The European ecosystem is moving on par with the global FoodTech ecosystem, with still quite a comparatively high share of the world’s FoodTech funding. As illustrated by the top deals, Europe’s FoodTech is still very diverse with key players in almost all categories.
3 – DigitalFoodLab’s FoodTech index
Beyond investments in startups, we consider more and more relevant to have an overview at companies beyond the startup stage, notably if we want to focus on how innovation can have an impact and create the conditions for the “future of food”.
That’s why we follow and update each quarter DigitalFoodLab’s FoodTech index which looks at how publicly traded startups (which underwent an IPO) are doing. As you can see in this chart, these companies combined have done quite well since the start of the year. They rose by about 28% in value while the overall market (in orange) rose only by 21%.
While this is still a small basket of highly volatile startups, but still, if it does well, notably if the companies behind it deliver value, it can:
- trigger more investments in earlier-stage startups by showing to investors the potential return on their investments;
- stimulate agrifood leaders to invest in the future of food to follow the same trend.
