Hi there,

We’ve got a jam-packed, fun edition for you this week! Let’s dig in.

This week's rundown:

💷 Modern Milkman bags £10M to remove plastic from grocery
💰 Evergreen Select raises $6M for cultivated meat
🥔 Why 4 million kilos of potatoes were just given away for free in Germany

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After years of building and scaling startups across emerging markets and food tech, Therese Scherer found herself returning to a question that had lingered since her time at Infarm: why do we let so much food rot before it ever leaves the farm? The answer led her from vertical farming in Berlin to fermentation at origin, working directly with farmers. Luvi Bio was born to stabilize fresh crops within hours of harvest, turning wasted biomass into high-value functional ingredients. Starting with coffee cherry pulp, the company connects overlooked farm side streams with real market demand. The ambition is simple but bold: fix food waste where it actually happens. Read the full conversation with Therese here.

🇬🇧 Modern Milkman, £10M ($14M), doorstep delivery service of refillable groceries. Investors: Led by Salica Investments.

🇺🇸 Evergreen Select, $6M, cultivated beef. Investors: S2G Investments, BOLD Capital Partners, Good Startup, and existing backers.

🇬🇧 Sparxell, €4.2M ($5M), bio-based, biodegradable pigments for applications including food. Investors: SWEN Capital Partners’s Blue Ocean 2 fund, Alpha Star Capital and Cambridge Enterprise.

🇺🇸 Mothership Materials, $5M, converts sidestreams into high-value, carbon-negative feedstocks like glucose, cellulose, proteins, and lipids. Investors: Branch Venture Group

🇸🇪 Wayout, SEK20M (€1.9M, $2.3M), container-based systems for water purification. Investors: Gullspång Re:food and existing backers.

🇳🇱 Proba, €1.25M ($1.5M), platform for certifying fertilizer-related Scope 3 emissions reductions in agri-food supply chains. Investors: Future Food Fund and Yield Lab Europe.

In this episode, I sit down with Yoni Glickman, Managing Partner of FoodSparks (PeakBridge’s seed-stage fund). Yoni shares why PeakBridge completely avoided the hype cycles of vertical farming and insect protein, focusing instead on a rational, "boring" thesis: solving real problems in the food system. Yoni breaks down why he believes the "Power Law" (one 10x exit returning the fund) doesn't apply to FoodTech and how he constructs a portfolio for realistic 2-5x returns. We also dive into his four new investments—including Finnish mushroom leader Kääpä Biotech and GI-health platform Evinature—and discuss the massive, underappreciated impact of "Direct-to-Patient" pharma and GLP-1 drugs on the future of nutrition.

🎧 Listen to the full episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to hear Yoni’s breakdown of why B2B ingredient blends are the smart play over consumer brands.

Alex’s Top Findings:

📦 Zipline surpasses 2 million drone deliveries, raises $600M.

🌽 Heritable Agriculture, an AI genomics startup spun out of Google’s X, has received a $5M grant from the Gates Foundation to build a cloud-based AI and multi-omics platform that accelerates the development of climate-resilient crops for smallholder farmers in low- and middle-income countries.

🐝 Robot Bees, Please! As pollinator populations continue to struggle, researchers are modifying drones to support almond, apple, and other tree crops.

❄️ Researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) have innovated a new eco-friendly cooling device that can reach temperatures as low as -12C (10F); it’s the first system in the world to reach sub-zero Celsius temperatures without the use of greenhouse gas refrigerants.

📉 DEFRA and Innovate UK are investing £1.34M ($1.8M) in 15 projects spanning low-emission farming and precision breeding, such as methane-cutting feed, climate-smart crops, biochar fertilizers, soil health and regenerative systems.

💉 The changing (and perhaps surprising) geography of diabetes (Hannah Ritchie).

🏆 HackSummit is kicking off FoodTech World Cup, “The ultimate arena to spotlight the world’s most promising food biotech startups.” Enter your startup today.

💶 biotope by VIB is looking for innovative planetary health biotech startups from all backgrounds and geographies who have a unique, biotech-based solution to a clearly articulated and quantified problem (TRL 3-5), preferably have (pending) IP, have 2 or more co-founders, and can get ready for the next funding round with an early-stage ticket of €350K and bespoke support. Apply by Feb 28, 2026.

The best HR advice comes from those in the trenches. That’s what this is: real-world HR insights delivered in a newsletter from Hebba Youssef, a Chief People Officer who’s been there. Practical, real strategies with a dash of humor. Because HR shouldn’t be thankless—and you shouldn’t be alone in it.

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🥔 To The Potato Rescue! A vast stockpile of potatoes is being given away for free in Germany, after a farm in Saxony benefited from a bumper harvest. [...] Dubbed "the great potato rescue," it is part of a plan to stop about 4 million kg (8.8 million lb) of surplus spuds from going to ruin. Food banks, schools, and churches are among the beneficiaries, according to the organizers. However, the enterprise was labelled a "disgusting PR stunt" by the Brandenburg Farmers' Association, which lamented the impact on local markets.

🇦🇮 There are now more than 1 million “.ai” domains, contributing an estimated $70M to Anguilla’s government revenue last year.

🥄 Have your cake spoon and eat it too.

📦 Goods, a new grocery store in Texas, delivers stuff via Pipedream’s autonomous underground delivery. Thread here, video here 👇

🤖 Figure AI’s Helix 02 humanoid robot executed a four-minute dishwasher cycle in a full-sized kitchen without human intervention.

😮 Rent a Human is an actual website, because ‘robots need your body’ as there are many ‘meatspace tasks’ that AI can’t do.

🚨 Five-Star Davos Experience: Entrepreneur Sebastian Heyneman was detained for 13 hours at the World Economic Forum in Davos after leaving a suspicious-looking prototype device unattended. While he missed a key event, Sebastian says the jail food was “phenomenal.”

We love you.
Daniel, Ilkka, and Alex

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🎵 Producing this issue, Ilkka was listening to In the Dark by Bring Me the Horizon while Daniel was listening to Always On The Run by Yuksek.

By Daniel Skavén Ruben, Ilkka Taponen, and Alex Shandrovsky.
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