#287
Hi there,
Daniel here. My old friends at The Rockefeller Foundation have opened applications for the 2027 Bellagio Center Residency Program. Over 26 days, Bellagio brings together “exceptional leaders, thinkers, and practitioners from across sectors and geographies to advance bold ideas that can help shape a more just and resilient world.”
And this year, there’s a thematic call for residencies aligned with Food Systems and Nutrition. Submit your expressions of interest by March 20, 2026.
The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center sits by Lake Como, Italy. Or as my Hotels.com review would say: "Decent spot for a sandwich. Mid-tier garden. 4/10."
This week's rundown:
💰 Guoke Xinglian bags $14.6M for precision-fermented lactoferrin
💶 FoodOp scores €5M for AI co-pilot to help professional kitchen cut admin and waste
💨 A Fitbit for farts
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FUNDING
Smarter Salmon, Smarter Greenhouses, and AI
Your personal chef is en route
🇺🇸/🇩🇪 Flink, $100M, speedy grocery delivery startup. Investors: Prosus Ventures and Btomorrow Ventures, the venture wing of British American Tobacco.
🇨🇳 Guoke Xinglian Technology Co, ¥100M ($14.6M) Series A+, precision-fermented human milk proteins such as lactoferrin. Investors: Shanghai Zhuiguang Julian, Lenovo Capital, and a fund under Changjin Holdings.
🇳🇴 Biosort, NOK 100M (~$10.5M), machine vision for individual salmon tracking and early suppression of sea lice. Investors: Grieg Kapital, Hatch Blue, IVC, Farvatn, and Futurum Ventures, alongside existing owners
🇪🇺 IKOS, €8M ($9M), sensors and a digital platform to automate field operations with AI. Investors: Impact Bridge.
🇫🇷 Amatera, €6M ($7M), development of climate-resilient crops using automated AI-driven breeding technologies. Investors: Demea Sustainable Investment (ex-Demeter), Oyster Bay Venture Capital, PINC, Mudcake and Exceptional Ventures.
🇩🇰 FoodOp, €5M ($6.1M), AI-driven co-pilot for professional kitchen operations to reduce admin and food waste and simplify procurement and menu planning. Investors: MK Capital and Footprint Fund.
🇬🇧 BindBridge, $3.8M, developing more effective, sustainable herbicides and crop protection products. Investors: Nucleus Capital and Speedinvest.
🇪🇸 Grodi, €2.5M (~$2.8M), autonomous robotics and computer vision platform for greenhouse crop automation. Investors: Swanlaab Innvierte Agri Food Tech (lead), Axon Desarrollo Andalucía, Innvierte (CDTI) and European Investment Bank.
🇩🇰 Mycoverse, €2.4M ($2.8M), AI-driven fungal biological crop protection targeting diseases like potato late blight. Investors: Future Food Fund, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), and PINC.
🇫🇮 NPHarvest, €1.2M ($1.3M), nitrogen and phosphorus recovery from liquid waste to create fertilizer inputs. Investors: Business Finland’s Deep Tech Accelerator, Nordic Foodtech VC.
🇸🇪 Musselfeed, SEK 5.3M (€500K / $580K), transforming blue mussels into sustainable products. Investors: New and existing investors.
INVESTMENT CLIMATE PODCAST
Mike Wolsfeld of AgWest Bio on how to get funded in 2026
In this episode, I sit down with Mike Wolsfeld, who manages the Techcom Fund at AgWest Bio. Operating as an equity investment fund ($50k–$300k checks) embedded inside a non-profit, Mike shares how they are turning Saskatchewan into a global magnet for precision fermentation and ag-tech startups. We discuss their unique mandate: attracting international deep-tech companies (like Argentina's Ergo) to the Canadian Prairies without forcing them to move their headquarters. Mike breaks down how their GAAP (Global Agri-Food Advancement Partnership) facility bridges the critical scale-up gap between bench science and commercial co-manufacturing, and why Canada’s crown corporations, like Farm Credit Canada (FCC), are deploying a historic $7 billion into the sector despite a broader VC downturn.
🎧 Listen to the full episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to hear Mike’s advice on how foreign startups can tap into Canada's massive pools of non-dilutive capital.
Alex’s Top Findings:
The "Gateway to Canada" Geo-Arbitrage. AgWest Bio offers a highly founder-friendly entry into the Canadian ecosystem. Unlike many regional funds that demand a full headquarters relocation, Mike’s fund only requires a federally incorporated subsidiary and 1-2 local employees. This allows international founders to access Canada's massive non-dilutive grants and specialized infrastructure without disrupting their global cap tables. "We're not asking for companies to entirely reincorporate, move everything here, move families... really at minimum what it looks like is a federally incorporated company with at least one or two full-time employees here in the province”.
Bridging the Fermentation "Valley of Death". The hardest part of precision fermentation isn't the lab science; it's scaling from milliliters to commercial thousands of liters. AgWest Bio manages the GAAP facility to explicitly solve this missing middle step, providing heavily discounted, shared-use bioreactors (5L to 100L) to get startups ready for large-scale co-manufacturing. "We're really trying to fill what we saw as a gap between that lab scale, bench scale and scale up... taking things out of an academic sort of research stage into that pre-commercialization... proving that it can scale up from milliliters to liters to 10 liters to sort of 20, 50."
The $7 Billion Crown Corporation Lifeline. While traditional VC fundraising in Canada hit historic lows recently, the AgTech sector is experiencing a massive, counter-cyclical cash injection. Mike highlights that Canadian Crown Corporations—specifically Farm Credit Canada (FCC)—are stepping in to anchor the ecosystem with billions of dollars, creating a rare window of opportunity for food tech founders willing to set up shop up north. "Canada actually in this time right now is at a historic low in terms of venture capital fundraising... But specifically on the AgTech side with FCC making this bold commitment to be a key anchor... increasing their contribution to $7 billion... now that money has to go to work."
NOTEWORTHY
Extra credit: 19-year-olds sell viral Cal AI to MyFitnessPal after hitting $30M revenue
Cal AI
🤝 MyFitnessPal has acquired its up-and-coming rival Cal AI, an AI-powered app built by two high school teenagers that reached $30M in revenue in under two years. The app simplifies nutrition tracking by allowing users to take photos of their food to log meals; the app then automatically estimates nutritional content.
🇫🇮 Helsinki to cut animal-based products. The City Council of Helsinki has approved a landmark initiative to cut the city’s procurement of meat and dairy products by 50% by 2030. “This is a victory for climate responsibility, animal welfare, and children’s right to a sustainable future,” Mai Kivelä, the Councillor behind the proposal, stated following the vote.
🐟 Seafood fraud has gotten pretty bad: 1 in 5 fish products is tied to fraud.
🐮 Cattle are heavier than ever, raising concerns in the industry about animal health.
🍭 US-based MycoTechnology secured self-affirmed GRAS status for Zukora, its precision-fermented sweet protein from honey truffles, which is 2,500 times sweeter than sugar.
🍫 Which type of chocolate has the lowest climate impact?
🧂 In an effort to improve public health, Thailand is preparing to introduce a sodium tax on manufacturers of packaged food, following its 2017 sugar tax.
INVESTMENT CLIMATE PODCAST
Auroni Majumdar of CJ Foods on how to get funded in 2026
In this episode, I sit down with Auroni Majumdar, Vice President of R&D Global Open Innovation at CJ Foods. Auroni pulls back the curtain on how a global food giant evaluates external technology, revealing why it operates on a strict 6-to-24-month horizon rather than chasing 10-year moonshots. We discuss the eight core product categories CJ cares about, why a startup's regulatory and shelf-life readiness is non-negotiable, and how startups can bypass the grueling 3-year Western retail reset cycle by leveraging CJ's vertical integration in Asian markets.
🎧 Listen to the full episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to hear Auroni’s advice on how to build an internal champion and why pitching technology without doing your homework on their current unit economics is a major red flag.
Alex’s Top Findings:
The "Near-Term" Mandate: No Science Projects. Auroni is exceptionally clear: CJ Foods is in the business of using technology, not commercializing raw academic research. If your tech is 3-4 years away from regulatory approval or commercial scale, it is too early for their core pipeline. They prioritize solutions with proven unit economics, and that can hit the market within 6 to 24 months.
Bypassing the Western Retail Trap. Startups often get mesmerized by the idea of landing a massive Western FMCG contract, ignoring that nationwide US distribution—dictated by rigid big-box retailer shelf resets and mandatory shelf-life studies—can take over 3 years to execute. Auroni highlights that CJ offers a faster, more nimble alternative through its vertical integration and the inherently quicker innovation cycles of Asian markets. "In the US, nationwide distribution requires your big box retailers... inherently, if you're a startup that's working in this system... you're already at three years in this system... CJ in Korea can move extremely fast. We're very vertically integrated... it might not be as big as [a Western MNC], but it'll be big and meaningful, and it'll be quicker."
The CJ "Triangle" of Scale: Foods + Bio + Startup. One of the most unique advantages CJ offers precision fermentation startups is its internal structure. CJ can facilitate a three-way partnership: the startup provides the IP, the CJ Bio Foundry provides the heavy CAPEX fermentation scale-up, and the CJ Foods division acts as the built-in, guaranteed offtake customer.
NEWS FROM THE FTW COMMUNITY
EIT Food Accelerator Network is now open for applications
📝 Applications for the EIT Food Accelerator Network 2026 are now open. Test your technology, boost your go-to-market readiness, strengthen corporate and investment readiness through expert coaching and masterclasses, get connected to leading corporates, and access up to €50,000 in funding. Apply here.
🏆 Applications are now open for the FoodTech World Cup, a global tournament to uncover the world’s best startups in Food Biotech, from stealth to Seed stage. Some 15 Semi Finalists will pitch their solution in a virtual Demo Day to a curated lineup of 5 investor and corporate judges. The most promising startups will be invited to pitch live at HackSummit on April 23rd, where a winner will be crowned live. Apply here.
🥇 Forward Fooding has unveiled the 2025 FoodTech 500 finalists. The final full rankings will be released in March 2026. Explore the full list here.
RANDOM STUFF
AI is solving science we can’t understand, while humans focus on the ‘Fitbit for farts’
❄️ We need this robot in Scandinavia:
⛷️ Also, robots can ski now.
❓ What happens in a world where AIs make scientific discoveries that humans cannot understand? The Legibility Problem.
💨 Scientists have developed a Fitbit for farts.
⚙️ Fully automated paper-airplane machine — built with LEGO.
😳 Burger King is rolling out AI headsets that will track employee ‘friendliness’.
🦙 And, finally, a gang of crime-fighting llamas!
We love you.
Daniel, Ilkka, and Alex
- - -
🎵 This issue was produced while Ilkka was listening to Bring Back the Plague by Cattle Decapitation. Daniel was listening to Roche by Sébastien Tellier.
THE LEFTOVERS
By Daniel Skavén Ruben, Ilkka Taponen, and Alex Shandrovsky.
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