#286
Hi there,
Ilkka here: This week Doordash reported large growth in 2025: Quarterly orders growing 32% YoY to 903 million, while Q4 revenue spiked 38%. For those interested, Modern Delivery blog offers a comprehensive analysis here.
In Finland, the DoorDash-owned Wolt has become a symbol of platform capitalism at its most extractive. Couriers wait in subzero temperatures in central Helsinki without access to basic facilities like restrooms, sometimes seeking shelter in school corridors. Even more alarming, delivery accounts are reportedly being subleased for fees of up to €700 ($825) per month. Those with the fewest options end up paying to work, while Wolt insists the practice is beyond its responsibility. Meanwhile, regulators still cannot decide whether couriers are employees or entrepreneurs, a convenient ambiguity that leaves workers carrying the risk.
But the exploitation of couriers is only part of the story. Delivery apps are steadily reshaping the economics and culture of food. Restaurants, already operating on razor-thin margins, surrender significant commissions to platforms that own neither kitchens nor dining rooms. Public life quietly thins out as fewer people gather in shared spaces.
As efficiency and algorithms continue to change the social and physical fabric of our cities, we are left with a clear choice. Is the convenience of door-to-door delivery worth the cost of a vanishing public square and an exploited workforce? Ultimately, the question isn’t just what we are eating, but what kind of community we are willing to sacrifice for it.
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This week's rundown:
💶 Verley and Those Vegan Cowboys bag €32M and €6M+ for precision-fermented dairy proteins
💶 REDUCED closes €4M to ferment food side streams into savory ingredients
🍫 Cultured cocoa products will hit the market in 2026
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INVESTMENT CLIMATE PODCAST
Del Afonso of Harmony Baby Nutrition on how to get funded in 2026
In this episode, I sit down with Del Afonso, Founder and CEO of Harmony Baby Nutrition. Their goal is to revolutionize the $100B infant nutrition industry by creating a sterile, human-breastmilk-based liquid formula that supports gut microbiome health without industrially added sugars
🎧 Listen to the full episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to hear why powdered formula is fundamentally flawed and how Harmony is raising a $2M bridge round to bring a sterile, liquid alternative to the market.
Alex’s Top Findings:
The Geo-Arbitrage Playbook: Extending Runway with Global R&D. Operating a biotech startup in Cambridge, MA, is prohibitively expensive. Del’s solution was to keep the HQ in the US but offshore the heavy scientific lifting. By utilizing highly qualified PhDs in Brazil and leveraging 70% wage reimbursement programs in Hong Kong, Harmony drastically cut their burn rate. "We grew up on scarcity. Big time... The amount of money we were paying for a senior researcher in the US, we can hire four to five researchers in Brazil."
Drawing the Line on the "Endless" R&D Cycle. Many deep-tech founders get stuck in the lab perfecting their technology while their runway evaporates. Del realized that to survive the current fundraising winter, they had to draw a hard line in the sand, freeze the "Generation 1" formula, and pivot entirely to commercialization to prove revenue traction before attempting a Series A.
Value Capture Requires a B2C Brand, Not a B2B Partnership. While selling a patented ingredient to a giant like Nestlé seems like the easier path, it leaves the startup with zero bargaining power. Del emphasizes that in monopolistic industries, the only way to truly capture the value of your innovation is to build your own brand and prove consumer demand directly. "If you really want to position yourself as an ingredient provider... you pretty much have no bargaining power when you're negotiating with those big players. The way that you can showcase what you're doing and actually capture value is when you hit the market with a product."
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FUNDING
Big week for fermentation as Verley, REDUCED, and Those Vegan Cowboys all raise funding
Image credit: Verley
🇫🇷 Verley, €32M ($37.7M) Series A, precision-fermented whey proteins for food applications. Investors: Alven, Blast, French Tech Seed, Sofinnova, Sparkfood, Captech and Founders Future.
🇩🇪 Foodforecast, €8M ($9.45M), software solution for demand and production forecasting for ultra-fresh food supply chains. Investors: SHIFT Invest, ECBF, Future Food Fund and Aeronaut Invest.
🇳🇴 Kilter, €6.5M ($7.6M) Series B, autonomous robots which perform ultra-precise spot spraying for high-value crops, reducing the usage of crop protection inputs. Investors: Kubota Corporation, SBG Invest AS, Pymwymic and Nufarm.
🇧🇪/ 🇳🇱 Those Vegan Cowboys, €6M+ ($7M+), precision-fermented casein for cheese. Investors: Crowdfunding.
🇧🇷 BemAgro, $5.8M Series A, AI and computer vision platform supporting growers in improving operational efficiency. Investors: The Yield Lab Latam. Grupo Colorado, CNH, Atvos, AgroVen, Rural Ventures, MM. Agro, Positive Investimentos e Participações and Suzano
🇩🇰 REDUCED, €4M ($4.7M) Series A extension, fermenting food side streams into natural savory ingredients for large-scale food manufacturers. Investors: Delphinus Venture Capital, Novo Holdings (Planetary Health Investments), European Circular Bioeconomy Fund (ECBF) and EIFO.
🇮🇹 NANDO, €3.3M ($3.9M), AI-driven monitoring to optimize waste and reduce food waste. Investors: MAIA Ventures, CDP Venture Capital, the Piemonte Next Fund, Club degli Investitori, La4G and EMBA Capital Partners.
🇳🇿 Forever Harvest, NZ$1.2M ($715K) pre-seed, fruits and nuts grown via cellular agriculture. Investors: Sprout Agritech, the Bioeconomy Science Institute and Callaghan Innovation’s Deep Tech Incubator programme.
INVESTMENT CLIMATE PODCAST
Bodil Sidén, General Partner at Kost Capital, on how to get funded in 2026
In this episode, I sit down with Bodil Sidén, General Partner at Kost Capital, a Copenhagen-based €20M early-stage venture fund and food tech studio. Bodil explains why the first wave of food tech struggled by focusing on low-margin B2C outputs, and why Kost Capital’s playbook revolves strictly around high-margin "inputs" (ingredients and enabling tech) functioning as "Trojan horses" for the existing food industry. We discuss their unique venture studio model—building "inception cases" from scratch in their basement test kitchen—and why €250k–€750k pre-seed checks are the perfect vehicle to co-lead deals alongside generalist VCs. Bodil also breaks down her thesis on the convergence of GLP-1s, wearable health tech, and the functional food transition, sharing insights from recent investments like Amass and Nordic Biofoods.
🎧 Listen to the full episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts to hear why Bodil is actively looking for "insanely impatient" founders who aren't afraid to stalk their customers.
Alex’s Top Findings:
The "Trojan Horse" Strategy: B2B Inputs over B2C Outputs. The era of launching low-margin, capital-intensive B2C meat alternatives is challenging. Kost Capital focuses on high-value ingredients (colorants, texturizers, Omega-3s) and enabling software that plugs directly into the existing 95% of the food industry. This avoids the need to build expensive new factories or fight food giants for grocery shelf space. "We don't really take a bet on new behaviors or anything, but want to improve what's already on the plate out there... If you look at the outputs that often have very low margins and that are competing with large food corporates with sort of insane distribution and marketing budgets... it just doesn't really add up."
Redefining the VC "Power Law" for FoodTech. For a €20M fund, you don't need a single 100x unicorn IPO to return the fund. Bodil argues that the FoodTech exit market relies heavily on trade sales and acquisitions by massive food corporates. By utilizing their venture studio to mitigate early risk, Kost Capital can target highly realistic acquisition sizes while maintaining a healthy fund return. "The advantage of having a 20 million fund is that to have a fund returner, you need obviously a smaller exit... in the food space, if you look at the exit market, it is often a trade sale or like an acquisition... we also have an opportunity to mitigate a little bit more and have a few more actually pretty solid exits across the portfolio."
Customer Stalking over "Dusty IP." Too many deep-tech founders fall in love with their lab research without actually testing market demand. Bodil emphasizes that food tech founders must adopt the scrappy, rapid-iteration mindset of software or D2C fashion brands. You have to prove someone will pay for your solution before spending years in R&D. "The danger with many IP-driven companies is that you are so deep into the research that you never talk to your potential customers... I look for founders that already, before they've started developing whatever product that is, know exactly what stakeholders they should be stalking... Learn from fashion. Learn from cutting-edge industries... See, does anyone want this?"
NOTEWORTHY
From muck to methane: Mapping the world’s crop-climate hotspots
🌎 Even though hundreds of crops are grown worldwide, just four crops — rice, maize (corn), wheat, and oil palm — drive about 2/3 of all crop emissions.
💡 Autopsy of the Agrifood–Climate Tech Collapse — inside the database of 113 agrifood–climate failures since 2023 and the four patterns that explain them. A must-read by Eugen Kaprov.
🍫 Puratos USA will launch “the world’s first professional chocolate product made with cultured cocoa” later this year, developed in collaboration with California Cultured. In related news, Cargill has partnered with Israeli cell-based cocoa producer Kokomodo to validate, test, and scale cell-based chocolate applications in industrial settings.
🐮 Ruminant BioTech has launched a CAD$7.6M ($5.5M) research program in Canada, backed by a Alberta government grant as well as industry co-funding and company capital, to validate and commercialize its slow-release methane-reduction bolus for pasture-raised cattle (h/t FoodHack)
🤷🏻 A major survey of almost 4,000 people in Denmark shows that not a single person adheres to all seven dietary guidelines set by the Danish government.
💰New York-based Great Circle Ventures has launched its first $20M fund to invest in early-stage food and beverage CPG / FMCG brands.
NEWS FROM THE FTW COMMUNITY
World Cups and Top 500s: FoodTech’s awards season is here
🥇The FoodTech World Cup is officially underway for 2026, hosted by FoodHack and Nestlé Research. 15 top teams will advance through to the virtual Semi-Final before the 5 brightest go head-to-head at the HackSummit’s Grand Final in Lausanne on April 23. Enter your startup here.
🏆 Forward Fooding has unveiled the 2025 FoodTech 500 finalists. The final rankings will be released in March 2026. Explore the full list here.
RANDOM STUFF
The world actually keeps getting better
📈 A healthy dose of optimism: 99 stories of progress from last year.
🔎 What the Epstein files reveal about EV startups and Silicon Valley (TechCrunch)
📰 The New York Times is no longer a news company:
🛒 The Lidl trolley bag:
Image credit: Courtesy Lidl and Nick Bentel
🥌 Probably useless, but cute — reimagining curling stones as dual-function snack bowls (here are some more fun creations from this designer):
Image: Gustaf Westman
We love you.
Daniel, Ilkka, and Alex
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🎵 This issue was produced while Daniel was listening to Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers. Ilkka was listening to Vanishing Twin by Textures.
THE LEFTOVERS
By Daniel Skavén Ruben, Ilkka Taponen, and Alex Shandrovsky.
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