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Hi there,
Happy Midsummer from Sweden. Snapped this photo at almost 10pm last night. Here’s Swedish Midsummer for Dummies (3 min video).
I have a soft spot for sunsets
🏅Congrats to fossil-free fertilizer startup NitroCapt, which just won the world’s largest environmental prize (and $2M). I’m a proud advisor to the company. More on their win below.
🗳 Last week I asked which part of the newsletter you get most value from. While only 39 people responded, it seems you appreciate many parts of the newsletter(except perhaps Conversations with Founders, but I’ve reduced that section in length and frequency).
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💬 Conversations with Founders (1)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 💰 Funding (12)
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🎙️ Investment Climate (5)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🧐 Noteworthy (10)
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🌍 News from the FoodTech Weekly community (5)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🎲 Random Stuff (6)
This week's rundown:
💶 Automated saffron farming startup BlueRedGold bags funding round
🤑Food as Medicine company Mealogic secures $16M in financing
🤠 Proposed warning labels on food products — in the most unlikely U.S. state.
Let's go!
Sponsored content:
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Over $2.7M has already been raised in this round — and the campaign closes June 20.
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💰 Funding
🇸🇪 BlueRedGold, which cultivates saffron indoors through the use of automated systems, has bagged €2.73M ($3.14M), led by PINC and joined by e.g. The Food Tech Lab and PolarVentures.
🇫🇷 Fungu’it has harvested €4M ($4.6M) to turn food waste, via fungi fermentation, into natural flavors for e.g. alternative meat products. The round was led by Asterion Ventures and backed by Evolem and UI Investissement.
🇮🇱 Algocell has closed a $2.8M pre-seed round led by Good Company VC and backed by the Israeli Innovation Authority and a group of angels. The company develops an AI-powered digital twin platform — a simulator — to help optimize bioprocessing and reduce the current trial and error approach used by the industry.
🇺🇸 Mealogic has raised $16M in funding led by S2G Investments and joined by Dohmen Company Foundation, U.S. Venture Partners, and Unilever Ventures. The Food as Medicine-focused company runs a B2B2C meal delivery platform that provides nutritionally tailored meals on a white-label basis to healthcare providers. This enables personalized, science-backed meals that support disease prevention and treatment.
🇳🇱 Rival Foods, which makes whole-cut, clean label plant-based meat alternatives, has scored €10M ($11.5M) from APG, PYMWYMIC and ROM Utrecht Region.
Image: Rival Foods
🇧🇪 Polysense has secured €2M ($2.3M) in Seed funding. The company uses AI and computer-aided quality inspections, which enables faster detection of defects and errors during food manufacturing, which helps boost efficiency and cut food waste.
🇳🇱 Scope Biosciences, a deeptech spinoff from Wageningen University & Research, has secured follow-on investment from SHIFT Invest and Oost NL; combined with an EIC Transition Grant, the company has received €6M ($6.9M) in Seed funding. The startup has developed a CRISPR-based diagnostic platform that enables e.g. earlier and more effective detection of crop diseases.
🎙️ Investment Climate: Jack Clegg of Platter on how to get funded in 2025
This week, Alex Shandrovsky met with Jack Clegg, CEO and Founder of Platter, a UK-based startup digitizing wholesale food ordering. Jack shares how he raised £350K ($470K) from 13 UK angels and the Startup Wise Guys accelerator—all while cycling groceries at night to pay rent and building Platter during the day. Full conversation on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Top three findings from this conversation:
Built from the Ground Up with Relentless Hustle. Jack built Platter while working nights delivering groceries and days building the company — sacrificing comfort to maintain momentum. " I delivered groceries five nights a week from 5:00 PM till 10, 11, sometimes a bit longer, and worked on Platter during the day. I did that for 12 months. I loved it because cycling around Hackney in East London delivering groceries gives you a lot of time to think about your business. Take your ego hat off. Don't be embarrassed to what you have to do to get shit done."
Skipped the ‘Friends and Family’ Round on Principle. Jack made a deliberate choice not to take easy capital from family, instead seeking validation from external angels who believed in the business, not just him. "I could have probably done the full lot from friends and family, but that’s too easy. I wanted people to back me because of the business, not because they were related."
Tactical Prospecting: Target Industry Veterans, Not ‘Investors’. Instead of generic investor titles, Jack targeted ex-CEOs and operators from food companies who understood the space and had capital. “ 70% of people who have ‘angel investor’ in their LinkedIn title aren’t actual investors. I looked for ex-CEOs of food businesses who had sold in the last 10–15 years.”
🧐 Noteworthy
✅ After tasting cultivated meat, Americans of all political affiliations oppose a ban, Vegconomist reports.
⚠️ A proposed bill in Texas would require specific warning labels on products intended for human consumption if they use certain ingredients like e.g. food dyes, sweeteners, and bleached flour. Observers say this could impact the U.S. packaged food industry on a larger scale.
🚱 Decades of drought has forced some U.S. farmers to learn about ‘dry farming’.
💡 Agrifood systems are the second-largest source of GHG emissions globally, yet receive just 3.8% of total mitigation finance. This, and much more, in this fantastic collection of visuals and a report from the ClimateShot Investor Coalition.
🏆 NitroCapt of Sweden has won the $2M Food Planet Prize 2025, the world’s largest environmental prize. The company has developed a technology that can produce nitrogen fertilizer by splitting nitrogen from the air with plasma technology, with green electricity as an input. According to the Food Planet Prize, this “reduces the use of energy tenfold, can be produced locally in smaller units, and avoids fossil-fuels entirely, producing a nitrate fertilizer that can improve soil health and be used sustainably by farmers across the world.”
Image: Food Planet Prize
🌍 News from the FoodTech Weekly community
👨🏻💻 Looking for an impactful job in food? Check out Mission Plant as well as Food Impact Careers.
🍫 Forward Fooding has published an excellent market update for alt coffee and chocolate.
👑 FOOD FOUNDERS Studio is hiring a Founder/CEO, to be based in Zurich (🇨🇭) to run a new FoodTech startup.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
🎲 Random Stuff
🍕 About an hour before the first Israeli strikes on Iran last week, open-source pizza tracking X account Pentagon Pizza Report noted that ‘nearly all pizza establishments nearby the Pentagon have experienced a HUGE surge in activity.’ The unscientific theory suggests that large pizza deliveries to the Department of Defense correlate with major U.S. military actions.
I love you.
Daniel
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🎵 This issue was produced while listening to Just What I Said (Everything In Its Right Place) by High Beam.
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