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Hi there,
Most of Europe is on vacation, but some of us are still working, as demonstrated by the flurry of funding rounds announced this week.
This week's rundown:
🤑 NetZeroNitrogen scores funding to help cut the use of synthetic fertilizer
🐮 Provectus Algae gets $10M+ for algae feed additive to cut cow methane emissions
❗Plus the guy getting caught running several fake embassies
And much more — Happy reading!
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💰 Funding
🇬🇧 NetZeroNitrogen (NZN) has closed a €5.6M ($6.6M) Seed round, co-led by World Fund and Azolla Ventures. The AgTech startup is developing a biofertilizer that can significantly reduce farmers’ use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. (For further background, I interviewed NZN’s CEO Justin Hughes for FTW in late 2024).
🇳🇱 Solynta, which develops potato varieties with enhanced resistance to disease and climate change, has been approved for €20M ($23.5M) in debt funding from the European Investment Bank.
🇦🇺 Provectus Algae has banked a $10.1M Series A round and secured a $2.5M grant from the Australian government. The company grows the red seaweed Asparagopsis, which is fed to cows to help cut their methane emissions. The round was led by At One Ventures and joined by Methane Mitigation Ventures, Mort & Co, and existing shareholders including Hitachi Ventures.
🇨🇦 Mara Renewables has landed a $9.1M funding round led by S2G Investments; the company uses a fermentation process to grow a fish-free omega-3 alternative, using algae. The lipids are then used in e.g. supplements, fish feed, baby formula, and health foods.
🇬🇧 Win-Win has scored a £3M ($4m) Series A round, led by Oetker Collection and FoodLabs, bringing its total funding to £8M. The startup develops and sells a cocoa-free chocolate alternative.
Win-Win
🇬🇧 Quorn, owned by Monde Nissin through Marlow Foods, has announced it has secured £18M ($24.3M) in new investment as part of the company’s efforts to address debt and revitalize the brand. In 2023, the company reported losses exceeding £60M ($81M), and 2024 data has indicated a further almost 10% drop in the brand’s market share.
🇪🇪 ÄIO, which converts agricultural and wood industry by-products into fats and oils using yeast fermentation (to help replace e.g. palm oil and coconut oil) has been awarded €1M ($1.17M) in public funding through the Estonian Business and Innovation Agency’s Applied Research Programme (RUP), to develop microbial fermentation-derived lipids for use in cosmetics.
🇮🇹 AgTech startup Plantvoice has netted a €500K ($587K) funding round, backed by Gemma Venture, Creazione Impresa, and the Salvi Family Holding. The startup monitors crop health in real time by analyzing plant sap using sensors and AI, making it possible to identify crop stressors (water, nutrition etc) at an early stage and take action.
🇺🇸 BiomEdit has scooped up a $18.4M Series B round led by Anterra Capital and joined by Nutreco, AgriZeroNZ, Elevate Ventures, and Betagro Ventures. The company is launching an engineered probiotic which will tackle a bacterial affliction that’s driving big losses for the broiler chicken industry.
🇪🇸 Vertical farming company Néboda has raised €1.84M ($2.16M) in Seed from Clave Capital (via its Mondragon Fondo de Promoción II), Unirisco, Xesgalicia, Eatable Adventures, and CDTI via its SICC Innvierte. Néboda has developed a platform integrating hydroponics, robotics, and AI, and claims it will be able to produce at costs competitive with traditional agriculture.
Néboda
🎙️ Investment Climate: Alon Chen of Tastewise on how to get funded in 2025
This week, Alex Shandrovsky met with Alon Chen, CEO and Co-Founder of Tastewise, which helps the food industry to digitize and automate their go-to market from accepting new products, to creating and generating more demand for their products, to enabling their sales team to be more successful in placing products on the shelf and the menu. The company recently raised a $50M Series B led by Telus.
The full conversation can be found on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Top three findings from this conversation:
Bridge Round as Strategic Onboarding. Two external industry players joined a bridge round before the Series B — including Telus — allowing time for mutual diligence and relationship building. " So that allowed us to get to know one another better, see the dynamics, get to see how the businesses are performing, and build a more meaningful relationship. Sometimes you have to do the bridge just to bring your money in and to extend the runway. We actually brought two new external investors that we thought were extremely important for the future of the company, and one of them actually ended up leading the round."
Protect Against Overvaluation Temptation. Alon cautions founders about inflated valuations in early rounds that lead to pain down the road for teams, customers, and investors. "I know the other way to grow with your valuation, not grow into your valuation. So raising money for that will get you into trouble because the evaluation is inflated. […] The idea is to think about your business in the long term and not to get tempted. By the way, a lot of money in the early days corrupted a lot of companies 'cause you're not focused, you are trying to double and triple your team every year.”
Good SaaS is Good SaaS—Even in Foodtech. Despite AgriFoodTech volatility, Tastewise stands out with traditional SaaS metrics: high NDR, low churn, strong growth, and margin. “ SaaS businesses are very easy to manage if you're focusing on the essentials, which is ‘Do I really generate revenue? Is my product sticky enough? Am I able to grow my portfolio?’ And I think we happen to be a software solution in the food industry. We're an enterprise software solution. We are attending agritech and food tech conferences, but essentially we're actually like a marketing cloud for the food industry. So the question is not about building cool businesses, it's about building things that people actually need.”
🧐 Noteworthy
🏭 GEA has opened a $20M tech center in Janesville, Wisconsin, designed to help the alt protein sector go from lab innovations to industrial production. This is GEA’s second such hub, after opening a similar facility in Hildesheim, Germany in 2023.
😵 Two California FoodTech companies are shutting down; alt meat startup Planetarians and gas-fermentation startup NovoNutrients (the latter of which raised an $18M Series A round as late as July 2024).
🤝 Matilda FoodTech (a B2B platform ‘connecting all functions of the meal process’) is acquiring PS in Foodservice, the largest search engine for the foodservice market in the Netherlands.
💶 Netherlands’ sovereign wealth fund Invest-NL has backed Dutch impact fund SHIFT Invest IV with €7.5M ($8.8M), as part of the fund’s total €150M target. The fund will invest in sustainable innovations in energy, mobility, agrifood, and the circular economy.
🚯 According to a new study from Ohio State University, vacationing Americans waste more than $2.3B of food each year. Almost half of short-term rental consumers, when surveyed, said they would like more info on how to donate uneaten food from their Airbnb stay.
🌍 News from the FoodTech Weekly community
👨🏻💻 Mycolever (🇩🇪) is hiring a Senior Bioprocess Engineer.
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🎲 Random Stuff
🏴 A man in New Delhi has been arrested, facing charges of running fake embassies. The man impersonated an ambassador (or advisor) to fictional countries such as Seborga, Ledonia, Poulvia, and Westarctica. Police have also recovered e.g. several cars with fake diplomatic plates, forged passports, and large sums of cash.
I love you.
Daniel
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🎵 This issue was produced while listening to Dreamer by Ozzy Osbourne.
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