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Hi there,
First of all, the next two weeks you’ll find me at Sweden FoodTech Big Meet, EAT Stockholm Food Forum, and Anuga. If you’re there too, come say hi!
I’m looking forward to chatting with ecosystem insiders on where we’re headed. On the one hand, investments are still happening; several French and Dutch alt protein startups for example announced $100M+ in total funding this week.
On the other hand, agrifoodtech VC fundraising is in freefall, having declined from $3.4B in 2022 to perhaps $200M-$400M this year. Too few startups have shown real and growing revenues from real customers. There have been very few exits, and VCs have been slow to repay their LPs. Scale-up capital is lagging. Generalist tech investors have long since moved on to AI, defensetech, and other hotter areas.
But we still need to transform the food system, and tech/innovation is needed for that — which takes massive investments. I hope to get a better sense for startup and investor sentiment by engaging with folks at these upcoming events.
And as always, I’ll try to share those learnings with you.
This week's rundown:
🫰 $100M+ in funding for European alt meat and alt ingredient startups Nxtfood, The Protein Brewery, and Revyve
📈 We’re on track for record crop harvests this year
🐮 Why scientists are painting zebra stripes on cows
Let's go!
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💰 Funding
🇫🇷 Nxtfood, which develops and sells plant-based meat using locally sourced wheat and pea proteins, has closed €49M ($57M) in funding, led by Creadev and Roquette Ventures, and joined by Clay Capital and IRD Invest (Groupe IRD). The company’s products, including plant-based kebabs, mince, and sausages, are sold in major French supermarket chains and 10K+ foodservice outlets. Nxtfood tripled its revenue in 2024.
🇳🇱 The Protein Brewery, which focuses on fungi-based food ingredients, has raised €30M ($35M) in Series B funding, backed by Invest-NL, Brabant Development Agency, Novo Holdings, Unovis Asset Management and Madeli. Specifically, the company plans to sell its mycoprotein (branded Fermotein) — which is neutral tasting, has 50% complete protein, and 35% healthy fibers — as a nutritional ingredient in various food applications.
🇬🇧 Scindo, which builds an AI-powered enzyme discovery and design platform, has bagged a £4M ($5.4M) Seed round co-led by Kadmos Capital and Clay Capital, and joined by PINC, Synbioven, Agfunder, SOSV, Farvatn Venture, and Savantus Ventures. The startup develops enzymes that can transform various feedstock into flavor and fragrance ingredients that traditionally have been sources from petrochemicals.
🇳🇱 PATS has banked €2.7M in Seed funding from e.g. Division Q, Percival Participations, and Delft Enterprises. The company develops automated, real-time pest monitoring and control systems that help growers cut chemical pesticide use and protect crops.
🇳🇱 Revyve, which develops yeast-based proteins that replace eggs and additives in food production, has announced €24M ($28M) in Series B funding, led by ABN Amro and Invest-NL, and joined by e.g. Grey Silo Ventures, Oost NL, and Royal Cosun. I interviewed Revyve’s co-founder Corjan van den Berg for FTW back in May 2024.
Images: Revyve / Peter de Klerk from Must&Stum
🇲🇽 Dinvertech has secured a $130M loan from IDB Invest to build high-tech greenhouses in Mexico.
🇫🇷 NeoFarm has harvested €30M ($35M) and will now build a 10 hectare (24 acre) robot-operated agroecological vegetable farm, aiming to build a total of 25 such farms by 2030.
🎙️ Investment Climate: Leander Hessner of Decameal on how to get funded in 2025
This week, Alex Shandrovsky met with Leander Hessner, CEO and Co-Founder of Decameal, a startup that upcycles invasive European green crabs and crustacean side streams into high-value feed ingredients. Leander explains how Decameal moved beyond “crab protein” to a patented separation process that yields a clean protein concentrate plus shell-derived compounds, landing pilot production inside a major Danish fish-feed company’s facility. After product trials with that partner performed well, the corporate came in as the largest check—unlocking a €700k equity round (without a formal lead) and a €1.4M Danish state grant to scale.
Full conversation on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Top three findings from this conversation:
Reality Check: Price & Function Beat “Green.” Sustainability alone won’t win the deal; unit economics and performance drive buying and investing decisions. ”You should probably start your pitch deck by showing your budget rather than showing your sustainability profile, because that's, in most cases, what the investors want to see. They want to know if you can actually make something that's profitable, and if it's also sustainable, then that's a plus.”
Valuation: Cap Table Health + Evidence. First round priced on potential; second round tied to production, timing, revenue paths, and maintaining founder ownership. " We had reached a suitable valuation from the first round that all the investors agreed to, and that would be healthy for our cap table. At that point, it's all about the potential. We didn't have much more than a product, and maybe someone who was willing to say what they were, wanted to pay for it. So the valuation at the first round was, the arguments for that weren't very strong, but we made it work anyway. The evaluation for the second round was a bit more rooted in what we can actually produce, when we can sell it, how much we can sell, and what the revenue will be.”
De-Risk with Trials First, Capital Follows. Product samples and fish-feed trials with a major corporate validated performance—then that corporate joined the round. " Last year, we did some trials with them, fish feed trials, where they got some samples of our products and tested them in their own laboratories and with their own fish. When they saw the results, they decided that they also wanted to be an investor.”
🧐 Noteworthy
🐟 A new Swedish initiative has, for the first time ever, fed fish with mycoprotein, mussels, and insects raised on residues from Sweden’s forests, oceans, and food industry. The initiative has 25 food value chain partners and is led by Axfoundation and SLU, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Conventional animal feed including fishmeal and soymeal drive overfishing and biodiversity loss, and the new initiative aims to prove the circular alternatives are possible.
💵 Gates Foundation and Novo Nordisk Foundation have extended the Acetate Consortium initiative by another two years with a $25.6M investment that aims turning CO2 into proteins, Green Queen reports.
🌾 The world is on track for record harvests this year, Hannah Ritchie notes.
🟥 Michroma, which produces heat- and pH-stable natural colors in fermentation tanks, has entered a strategic partnership with South Korean food and biomanufacturing giant CJ CheilJedang to advance commercial manufacturing of its pigments. Natural pigments produced by microbes in fermentation tanks can outperform botanical colorants such as beets and carrots on taste, consistency, and stability, startups like Michroma claim.
📉 A new report from Pitchbook on fundraising by specialist agrifood VCs shows collapsing numbers. Agrifood VCs raised $3.4B for new funds in 2022, $1.2B for new funds in 2024, and H1 2025 has just seen $0.2B raised. Agrifood makes up just 1% of total VC funds raised.
Pitchbook
🌍 News from the FoodTech Weekly community
💡 VC Math in Agrifood Tech: What It Takes to Return the Fund — excellent read from Eshan Samaranayake on how e.g. ownership, dilution, and exits shape fund returns through an agrifood lens.
🍄🟫 Fungi startups or scaleups (pre-seed to Series A), through the Future of Fungi Award 2025 you can win €250K investment to back your startup/scaleup, get access to a top tier expert network to support, and gain fungal fame and global visibility. Applications close on October 1 — apply now.
📢 We are supporting Forward Fooding with the 2025 edition of the FoodTech 500 and their search for this year’s 500 most inspirational AgriFoodTech innovators and disruptors. Submit your application here.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
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🎲 Random Stuff
🙊 Scientists have found that chimpanzees might be consuming the equivalent of a cocktail full of alcohol per day, from the fermented fruit they eat (if you want to go down a rabbit hole, here’s more on the Drunken Monkey Hypothesis).
🍍 Israeli runner Moshe Lederfien, AKA the Pineapple Marathon Runner, just completed the Berlin Marathon in 5 hours and 38 minutes, while balancing a pineapple on his head. He’s also been seen running with a watermelon.
🧸 Fat Bear Week in Alaska is on again. The brown bear contestants bulk up on salmon and similar goodies before going into hibernation for the winter. Last year, 1M+ votes were cast.
🏌️♀️European pro golfers are preparing for heckling at Ryder Cup by wearing VR headsets that replicate an unwelcoming ambience.
🦓🐮 A team from Japan has won the Ig Nobel prize for demonstrating that painting cows like zebras (i.e. with black and white stripes) reduced the fly bites by 50%, which can help cut the use of pesticides.
“Do these stripes make me look slimmer?”
I love you.
Daniel
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🎵 This issue was produced while listening to I Will Wait by Mumford & Sons.
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