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This week's rundown:
💰 Big funding rounds for precision fermentation and cultivated meat startups
🧏 SonicFlora lands funding for tech that listens to sounds from plants
🚓 How a talking parrot helped bring down a drug gang
Let's go!
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💬 Conversation with Tal Govrin of Kokomodo
After two decades working across business, government, and industry, Tal Govrin set out to rethink one of the world’s most beloved — and troubled — ingredients: cacao. The result is a cell-based cacao platform designed for stability, traceability, and function. Kokomodo’s approach could help avoid 14,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions and unlock new potential for clean-label and health-focused products across food, beverage, and supplement categories. Read the full conversation to learn how Kokomodo is reimagining cacao from the cell up — and what’s next.
Tal Govrin / Kokomodo
💰 Funding
🇨🇿 Mewery, which develops cultivated meat through a proprietary process combining pork and microalgae cells, has banked €3M ($3.5M) in fresh funding, mainly from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator, but also from the Horizon Europe research program, through an international consortium led by Wageningen University & Research (WUR).
🇺🇸 Geltor has closed a new equity round co-led by Starlight Ventures and iSelect Fund, bringing total funding to $137M [note: Pitchbook says Geltor had previously raised $113M, which would make this new round $24M]. Geltor uses microbes to design novel proteins like collagen and elastin without using animals; the company’s early mission was to develop animal-free, fermentation-derived gelatin.
🇺🇸 FloVision has raised a $8.7M Series A round led by Insight Partners and joined by SOSV’s Ireland Biomanufacturing Fund, Serra Ventures, and Rockstart. The company develops AI-powered tools that help food processors e.g. monitor quality in real time, scanning every product moving through the line on a conveyor belt. This makes sure that e.g. defects and foreign materials can be detected and dealt with immediately, which helps reduce waste.
🇺🇸 Cultivated fish startup Atlantic Fish Co. has reeled in a $305K SBIR grant from the National Science Foundation, bringing the company’s non-dilutive funding north of $700K.
🇸🇪 SonicFlora has harvested a SEK 2.7M ($280K) pre-seed round, led with SEK 1.2M ($130K) by Almi Invest. The startup has developed an AI-based platform that listens and interprets ultrasonic signals emitted by plants, to detect stress at an early stage. This will help growers act before symptoms like pests or water stress become severe.
The Plant Listeners - SonicFlora
🎙️ Investment Climate: Daan Raemdonck of Koppie on how to get funded in 2025
This week, Alex Shandrovsky met with Daan Raemdonck, Founder and CEO of Koppie, a Belgium-based startup developing fermented coffee alternatives to help safeguard the future of coffee. Daan shares how Koppie raised its pre-seed round led by Nucleus Capital, with follow-on investment from Mudcake, Rockstar, and angel investors—all through warm intros while in stealth.
The full conversation can be found on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Top three findings from this conversation:
Warm Intros Are Everything in Stealth. Koppie raised its pre-seed round entirely through warm introductions while still in stealth mode. ”Almost everything has been a warm introduction.”
Outperformed Competitors in Independent Taste Test. A blind test by certified Q-graders validated the product, helping build conviction internally and with investors. " We had an independent test done over the summer of 2024, and in that independent test, we outperformed all the alternatives we could source in Europe. That's for me the reason to stop all activities and to say, ‘okay, now I'm going all in on this,’ what used to be at that point, just a random idea.”
Reverse Due Diligence on Investors. Daan assessed investor quality based on how well they challenged the team during early calls. “ The first call is where you're trying to pitch your startup, but you're also listening to the questions they ask. […] What is also interesting is that we felt that they asked the right questions, in-depth questions, and they understood what we were trying to do. […] They challenged our thinking, and they pushed us forward during the interview. Those are the investors you want.”
🧐 Noteworthy
📊 A new Pitchbook report shows that 118 AgTech deals totaling $1.5B took place in Q2 2025; while valuations were up 59%, deal activity fell 22.8% (vs. the previous quarter).
🤝 Cell-based dairy startup Opalia has secured what it claims is the world’s first commercial supply agreement for the industry; it will sell ingredients to Dutch dairy giant Hoogwegt.
🏪 Grocery stores are experimenting with surge pricing.
🐟 Canada’s Ocean Supercluster is investing $1.9M to scale the manufacturing of plant-based whitefish, the first such initiative in the country to commercialize a domestically produced option to conventional whitefish.
💡 Sonalie Figueiras of Green Queen has written a fantastic summary on the state of regulatory approvals for cultivated proteins — e.g. Vow, Wildtype, Friends & Family, Mission Barns, and Believer Meats in 2025 alone — with a lot of “first-ever approvals” for e.g. cultivated fat, fish, and pet food. Make sure to read the full post.
Green Queen / Sonalie Figueiras
🌍 News from the FoodTech Weekly community
👨🏻💻 Klim (🇩🇪) is hiring a CTO… Nutropy (🇫🇷) has a number of open roles in business and science.
🐮 Volta Greentech, which develops methane-reducing feed additives, is looking to expand their trials and are inviting research farms and academic partners to test the product Lome under local farm conditions, globally. Are you a researcher interested in trialing Lome and advancing the development of next generation methane-reducing feed additives, get in touch with Angelo Demeter, co-founder, Volta.
🎤 Sweden FoodTech Big Meet takes place on Sep 29-30 in Stockholm, Sweden, at the heart of Rosendal Garden. Inspiring lectures, interactive roundtables and workshops, test kitchens, shared experiences, networking, and much more. Tickets are out now.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
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🎲 Random Stuff
🍞 Is bread making us sad? (h/t Julia Glotz)
🚜 U.S. tractor theft has increased sharply; here’s why.
🍕 U.S. adults receive 53% of their daily calories from ultra-processed foods, a new report from the CDC finds.
We joked about this scene, then we became it.
🐺 The USDA is using the heated argument scene from Adam Driver’s and Scarlett Johansson’s movie Marriage Story to scare away hungry wolves that are attacking local livestock in Oregon.
🦜 A talking parrot helped expose a drug gang in the U.K. after one of the gang members trained it to repeat dealer slang, such as “two for 25.”
🤷♂️ Speaking about pets, Aalborg Zoo in Denmark went viral after a Facebook post last week where the zoo encouraged pet owners to donate their unwanted guinea pigs, chickens, rabbits, and small horses as feed to the zoo’s predators, to help imitate the natural food chain of animals.
The Facebook comment section went haywire, with some gems like this one (“What if you’ve grown tired of some of your children during the holiday?”)
I love you.
Daniel
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🎵 This issue was produced while listening to The Love by Dekker.
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