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Hi there,
We know that life as a founder is incredibly tough. It often feels like you’re running a marathon while trying to build the shoes as you go.
We’ve always thought about ways to actually make your founder life a little easier. We previously built free tools like The Ultimate FoodTech Resource Guide, and another guide on how to pitch AgriFoodTech media, that both remain super popular.
We wanted to create something that saves you the one thing you never have enough of: time. Therefore, we’ve spent the last few months (and really, the last five years of newsletter archives) cleaning up and organizing our data into a huge AgriFoodTech Investor Database. Instead of you spending weeks chasing leads that aren’t the right fit, we’ve manually vetted thousands of investors — names, geo focus, previous investments, ticket sizes, and much more. We’ve got 2,500+ entries (rows of investors) and we’re adding more investors weekly, constantly enhancing the database.
Beyond the data, we wanted to add a human element, too. So we put together a playbook of 50+ deep interviews with founders who have successfully managed to close funding rounds in 2025.
And we’ve included two more things we thought could create value. First, a 1:1 pitch deck design session with an expert to help you clarify your story and engage investors through strategic deck design. Second, a 1:1 investability session with an expert to help you understand if your company is VC investable.
We call this FTW Plus. We hope you’ll like it. FTW Plus is an inexpensive way for you to save time and get back to the work that actually matters — building the future of food.
Thanks for being part of this community. We’re rooting for you.
The AgriFoodTech cheat code you’ve been waiting for
This week's rundown:
💶 Mycophyto bags €16M for regen ag biostimulants
💶 one.five scores €14M for AI-powered solutions to accelerate packaging product development
🐮 Scientists confirm first tool-using cow
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FUNDING
one.five secures €14M to scale its AI co-pilot for packaging development
Image credit: one.five
🇫🇷 Mycophyto, €16M ($19M), regenerative agricultural biostimulants developer. Investors: BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, Innovacom, CDG Invest, Crédit Agricole CIB, and more.
🇩🇪 one.five, €14M ($16.4M), AI-powered solutions for accelerating packaging product development. Investors: Dr. Hans Riegel Holding (key shareholder of HARIBO), 212 NexT, Symbia VC, Btomorrow Ventures, KIMPA Impact, Zubi Capital and existing investors Speedinvest, Planet A, Green Generation Fund, Climentum Capital, Revent and WEPA Ventures.
🇺🇸 Ammobia, $7.5M, lower-temperature, lower-pressure version of the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia production. Investors: Air Liquide, Chevron, and Shell.
🇨🇦 Maia Farms, C$3.75M ($2.7M), mushroom flours and textured mycelium ingredients for food applications. Investors: Nya Planet, Ag-West Bio, PIC Investment Group, and Deep Checks.
🇰🇷 Wake, sum undisclosed, beanless coffee through traditional fermentation and ‘molecular hacking'. Investors: Signite Partners and The Ventures.
🇸🇪 Molecular Attraction, sum undisclosed, develops pheromones, stimulants, and attractants to control vectors and pests. Investors: UpRoot Capital
UPGRADE TO FTW PLUS
The only AgriFoodTech investor database you’ll need
Fundraising for your startup? Or just want to start building relationships with investors ahead of your future raise?
We’ve got you covered. Upgrade to FTW Plus and get:
✅ Full access to our exclusive AgriFoodTech Investor database, covering thousands of AgriFoodTech Investors ($5,000 value)
✅ Access to The Investor Climate Playbook: 50 Interviews With Founders Who Raised in 2025 ($50 value)
✅ FREE 1:1 pitch deck feedback session with an expert ($200 value)
✅ FREE 1:1 investability session with an expert ($200 value)
INVESTMENT CLIMATE PODCAST
Randi Wahlsten, CEO and Co-founder of Matr Foods, on how to get funded in 2026
In this episode, I sit down with Randi Wahlsten, CEO and Co-founder of Matr Foods, a Danish startup that just secured a massive €40M Series A led by Novo Holdings and The European Investment Bank. Randi reveals how she moved from a pilot line in an old fish factory to funding a "First of a Kind" (FOAK) industrial facility. We discuss why Matr Foods rejected the asset-light CDMO model out of necessity, how they achieved an 80-90% repurchase rate by targeting high-end culinary partners first, and why the future of the industry isn't "meat substitution" but creating entirely new food categories focused on gut health and fiber.
🎧 Listen to the full episode to hear Randi’s strategy on pricing for profitability rather than "fake success." — on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Alex’s Top Findings:
Your lead investor might come from a “non-fundraising” moment. Randi didn’t meet Novo through a formal intro or a classic pitch meeting. It started because she joined a debate/panel and did a short pitch in that setting. Afterward, a Novo investor approached her and said, “Let’s talk,” and that opened the door. “ I was asked to participate in a debate where I needed to do a little bit of a pitch for a panel, and one of the people on the panel was a Novo Holdings investor, and he came up to me afterwards and said, ‘That's really interesting. Let's have that conversation,’ and that really is how it started. I would normally never think that those kinds of setups would lead to anything, but in our case, it did.”
CapEx wasn’t a strategic preference. It was forced by reality. In a climate where investors love "asset-light," Matr Foods went heavy. Randi explains that for novel fermentation technologies, the CDMO capacity simply doesn't exist yet. By building their own facility, they secure IP, speed of innovation, and long-term margin control that third-party manufacturing can never offer. "We looked at the market very thoroughly across Europe... and we couldn't find anyone anywhere who had facilities that would be close to ready to produce the product... It was by necessity that we said then we're gonna have to scale this technology ourselves."
The "Quality of Revenue" Metric. With limited pilot volume (20-30 tons), Matr couldn't rely on massive sales data to raise its Series A. Instead, they focused on who was buying (aspirational brands like Gasoline Grill) and the repurchase rate. Proving that 80-90% of chefs re-ordered was more valuable than vanity metrics from deep discounting. "You can make a fake success by putting it out in the market at half price... but that's not really proof of anything. We’ve seen... between 80 and 90% repurchase rate. So we've seen that once they've tried it, they're coming back."
NOTEWORTHY
Chinese researchers crack clonal hybrid rice, slashing seed costs 99%
Wang Kejian, Chief Scientist of the rice research team
🌾 Chinese researchers have developed a form of hybrid rice that can replicate itself through seeds that are clones, preserving high-yield traits generation after generation. The scientists hope their breakthrough could help remove the need for farmers to buy expensive new hybrid seeds every season.
💰 Tufts University will use a $2.1M state grant to launch an innovation hub aimed at bringing future foods such as cultivated meat to market.
💰 Funded by a $2M Bezos Earth Fund grant, Australian national research agency CSIRO and the UK’s University of Leeds are developing an AI tool that can convert food waste into sustainable protein, Green Queen reports.
📲 ILRI, the International Livestock Research Institute, has launched an AI tool (a chatbot) to improve evidence-based answers to animal health questions, hoping to help livestock farmers across Africa threatened by e.g. livestock diseases.
💶 Netherlands-based startup Time-Traveling Milkman is collaborating with Finland’s VTT Technical Research Centre on a $700K EIT Food backed project aimed at creating plant protein from sunflower sidestreams.
💶 Finnish startup NPHarvest, which develops fertilizer inputs from liquid waste streams, has been selected by Business Finland to receive up to €1.2M ($1.4M) in funding.
🍺 Yeast from breweries could supply a key ingredient for lab-grown meat.
🤝 Startups Cell4Food and Algocell have announced a strategic collaboration, integrating Cell4Foods’s cell cultivation tech stack spanning from fish to mollusc and crustacean animal cells through to final products, with Algocell’s AI-powered bioprocess modeling platform. The companies hope the collaboration can help cut trial-and-error by 80% and accelerate development and scale-up of cell cultivation.
🪦 Swedish AgTech company Cinis Fertilizer, which produced sustainable mineral fertilizer through upcycling of industrial waste, has filed for bankruptcy. Cinis had raised SEK 216M ($24M) and was burdened by SEK 500M ($55M) in debt.
NEWS FROM THE FTW COMMUNITY
People person with a deep interest in VC/PE markets?
👨🏻💻 KAPITAL (🇨🇭/🇪🇺) is hiring for a Partnerships & Growth Lead.
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RANDOM STUFF
Climate, consciousness, and curious cattle
Veronika in action
🌎 Where are we with climate change, and what can we do about it in 2026? Paul Gambill breaks it down for us in his latest blog post.
🍵 Here is something new: The Booming Business in Drinking Yourself to Sleep (sorry, the answer is not beer).
🐻 South Korea has banned bear bile farming, thus ending the breeding, possession and bile extraction of bears amid strengthened animal welfare laws.
🐮 Decoding moos: Researchers think they are getting closer to understanding cows.
🐮 Talking about cows: Veronika the cow from Austria has learned to use a tool — the first such experimentally verified instance, scientists say.
We love you.
Daniel, Ilkka, and Alex
- - -
🎵 This issue was produced while Daniel was listening to Baraye by Shervin Hajipour, and Ilkka was listening to exit.wound - g.h0st Remix by Darknet.
THE LEFTOVERS
By Daniel Skavén Ruben, Ilkka Taponen, and Alex Shandrovsky.
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