#268
Hi there,
While funding for alt protein, indoor vertical farming, and quick commerce has pretty much dried up, startups in automation, robotics, and precision agriculture keep attracting investor interest.
This week Ecorobotix announced $150M in new funding, following double-digit million dollar funding round announcements in recent months from industry peers SwarmFarm Robotics, Orchard Robotics, Saga Robotics, and 4AG.
Farmers in many regions face acute labor shortages and rising costs, especially in high-touch specialty crops that rely on manual precision work. At the same time, regulatory and supply chain pressures are driving demand for solutions that cut fertilizer, pesticide, fuel, and water use.
Meanwhile, advances in AI, sensors, computer vision, and low-cost LiDAR have finally made it possible to deploy profitable, fully autonomous field robots operating around the clock.
There’s also growing strategic interest from major agribusinesses and governments, eager to strengthen food security and reduce emissions. Investors see this as setting up a credible exit pathway, with many ag-robotics startups likely to be acquired by equipment manufacturers or ag-input giants.
And the AgriFoodTech sector desperately needs more exits — not just funding rounds.
This week's rundown:
🤖 Ecorobotix secures $150M for AI robots that detect weeds and spray micro-doses.
🥩 Gourmey merges with Vital Meat to form PARIMA, focused on cultivated poultry.
💶 Maia Ventures closes €55M fund for early-stage AgriFoodTech.
Let's go!
💰 Funding
🇬🇧 Wild Bioscience has raised a $60M Series A, led by Larry Ellison’s Ellison Institute of Technology. The startup uses AI and evolutionary genomics to identify naturally resilient traits (such as drought tolerance, disease resistance, and higher yield potential) in wild species and then introduces these traits into existing crop varieties without the use of GMO tech.
🇨🇦 Vive Crop Protection has bagged $10M from Farm Credit Canada, Emmertech, iSelect, and BDC Capital Funding. The startup uses a nanoscale, polymer-based system to deliver both chemical and biological active ingredients on fields, enabling better performance and reduced environmental impact.
🇺🇸 Ascribe Bio has closed a $12M Series A round, led by Acre Venture Partners and Corteva. The company provides what it says is an affordable, easy-to-use biofungicide that enables more environmentally sustainable crop disease control for farmers.
🇺🇸 Lasso launched with $6.5M in funding led by Rhapsody Venture Partners. The startup has developed a fiber-spinning system similar to a cotton candy machine that enables clean-label, protein-rich products from simple ingredients, in plant-based meat and beyond.
🇨🇭Ecorobotix has announced it has raised $150M across Series C and D rounds during 2024e-2025, led by Highland Europe, The European Circular Bioeconomy Fund, and McWin Capital Partners. The company builds autonomous and semi-autonomous robot systems that use tech (e.g. cameras, sensors, computer vision, and machine learning) to detect e.g. weeds in crop fields, and spray micro-doses of herbicides and pesticides where needed.
Ecorobotix
🎙️ Investment Climate: Thijs Bosch of The Protein Brewery on how to get funded in 2025
This week, Alex Shandrovsky met with Thijs Bosch, CEO of The Protein Brewery, a Dutch biomass-fermentation scale-up making a mycelium-based protein-and-fiber powder for food and nutrition. Fresh off a €30M Series B led by Invest-NL and BOM with continued support from existing backers (including Novo Holdings), Thijs explains how he stepped in mid-process to close a 15-month fundraise while steering a strategic pivot from alt-meat into active nutrition and healthy aging. He’s candid on valuation realities, why an eventual strategic exit is likelier than IPO, and what the team needs next: U.S. partners in sports/active nutrition and wellness ready to trial at industrial scale.
The full conversation can be found on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Top three findings from this conversation:
Investor Conviction: Customers Spoke During DD. Letting brand R&D/marketing validate taste/texture/use-case to investors beat vanity pipeline charts. “Get those customers and those promoters to talk to your investors during the commercial due diligence. That has been very helpful.”
New CEO, Same Raise: Leadership Switch Mid-Process. Thijs joined five months ago and finished a 15-month fundraise already in motion—while investors assessed the new plan. “ I joined the Protein Brewery about five months ago. I'm new to the company, and I basically dropped in the middle of the fundraising process. I took over from the former CEO.”
Sustainability Still Matters (Even If It’s “Hygiene”). Fermentation’s land/water/CO₂ footprint remains a core part of The Protein Brewery’s investment and customer story. “ Nowadays, it's a ticket to the table or it's a hygiene factor for many scale-ups, but fermentation technology as such, and especially if you do it in a minimal process way, requires a fraction of the land, a fraction of the water, a fraction of the CO2, etc. Also, for all of our investors, it's still a key point. Sometimes it gets a bit overshadowed in the current discussions, but for a lot of investors, it is still very important.”
🧐 Noteworthy
🤝 French cultivated meat startup Gourmey has acquired Vital Meat, forming a new entity called PARIMA, which will focus on next-gen animal products such as cultivated duck and chicken meat (if of interest, I interviewed Gourmey’s CEO Nicolas Morin-Forest 5 years ago for FTW).
👋 Nestlé (which at $100B annual revenue is the world’s largest food company) has left the Dairy Methane Action Alliance whose members pledge to cut methane emissions from dairy production, Green Queen reports.
💶 Maia Ventures has closed a €55M ($64M) fund, which will back 20-25 early-stage AgriFoodTech startups in Italy, Europe, and potentially the U.S.
💵 Reservoir VC has launched an evergreen fund which will invest in early-stage startups in robotics, automation, precision ag, and AI SaaS.
🥛 Verley (formerly known as Bon Vivant) of France aims to launch its precision-fermented whey proteins (in the form of RTD beverages and high-protein shots) in the U.S. in 2026 after having secured FDA GRAS approval.
Verley
🌍 News from the FoodTech Weekly community
👨🏻💻 SMEY (🇩🇪) is hiring an Analytical Chemistry Scientist… Melt&Marble (🇸🇪) is recruiting a Product Application & QC Specialist.
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🎲 Random Stuff
🍂 Most Americans don’t know what real cinnamon tastes like.
👵 People with stronger, more diverse social connections show slower biological aging (h/t Azeem Azhar).
🥴 Guests of the Museum of Ice Cream in NYC are getting drunk; nearby SoHo residents are unhappy about it.
I love you.
Daniel
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