🌳 Bioeconomy Newsletter #26
News, recent funding announcements and very interesting reads
Funding
🌿 BeZero Carbon - US - $ 50M - Series B - Voluntary carbon market scoring platform
🌿 BioFluff - US - $ 500k - Pre-Seed - Plant-based fur mimicking conventional animal fur and popular synthetics
🌿 Butter - US - $ 9M - Series A - Management system for food distribution businesses
🌿 Clarifruit - Israel - $ 12M - Series A - AI-powered quality control technology for fresh produce
🌿 Cultimate Foods - Germany - EUR 700k - Pre-Seed - Cultivated fat for hybrid alt-meat products
🌿 Eden Bio - UK - GBP 1M - Seed - Using machine learning to increase protein yield by optimizing microorganism strains
🌿 Freight Farms - US - $ 17.5M - Series B - Vertical hydroponic farms in shipping containers
🌿 Overstory - Netherlands - EUR 5.2M - Early VC - Real-time analysis of natural resources using high-resolution satellite imagery and AI
🌿 Peptyde Bio - US - $ 1.2M - Pre-Seed - Nature-based biofungicides
🌿 Soft Robotics - US - $ 26M - Series C - Automated picking solutions using soft robotic grippers, 3D machine perception, and artificial intelligence
🌿 VEGDOG - Germany - EUR 3.5M - Series A - Vegan, gluten-free dog food meeting nutritional needs
🌿 Vow - Australia - $ 49.2M - Series A - Cultivated meat, including exotic (e.g. kangaroo)
🌿 Celleste Bio - Israel - Undisclosed - Seed - Cell-cultured cocoa ingredients
🌿 From Sand to Green - France - $ 150k - Preseed - Capturing CO2 with fruit and biofuel plantations irrigated by desalination of seawater, powered by sun
🌿 Happy Ocean Foods - Germany - Undisclosed - Crowdfunding - Sustainable, plant-based fish and seafood
🌿 Cricularise - Netherlands - EUR 11 m - Series A - blockchain-based traceability platform for supply chains
🌿 Do you like what you are reading? Why not share it with your network?
Resources
🧩 Capacitor is a free worldwide database of microbial fermentation capacity
🧩 A list of Top 100 Alternative protein startups to watch
🧩 Frontier is publishing a database highlighting 100+ critical research and innovation gaps in carbon removal—the CDR Knowledge Gap Database.
🧩 Special focus: CLIMATE TECH HIRING
👉 Database covering all the climate tech VCs portfolio job postings.
👉 Do you want to pivot your career into climate tech? Find here all the relevant communities, job portals, podcasts & fellowships!
👉 Engineers are quitting for climate tech. There is a huge migration happening and the motivation is clear: You can be proud of what you’re doing and not ashamed anymore.
News, Readings & Interesting Things
📗 Great read by Pale Blue Dot VC about Fungi based material. There is hardly a bio-based material source with as many potential applications as fungi.
📗 A great read about the Industrialization of biotech vs. the biologization of industries.
📗 The big news of last week. Read the actual FDA’s answer to Upside Foods stating that the company’s cell-cultured meat is “as safe as comparable foods produced by other methods and would not contain substances that adulterate the food”.
Will this make the whole industry be more optimistic on when cultivated meat hits the super market shelfs? 15 years of claims for when cultivated meat will reach the market
📗From science to CPG. A series examining the challenges food tech companies face when scaling up.
📗 Israeli AgTech map from Startup Nation Central:
📗 A report on Agri-Food ecosystem in Germany by BCG and German Agrifood Society:
📗 Top 20 FoodTech startups of 2022 in Spain:
📗 Revere, a startup by Angellist executive, Eric Woo, is trying to introduce a rating system to the VC industry. Their goal is to create a more standardized way to track information about fund managers so that institutional investors know how to navigate the shifting landscape. They strive to produce PDF reports on funds within a 11-day timeframe, working as a team of 15.
Thanks for reading. Reach me with tips, questions, and feedback on Twitter or LinkedIn.
If you enjoy this newsletter, why not share it with your friends and co-workers?
___
The views expressed here are my own. All information contained in here has been obtained from publicly available information. While taken from sources believed to be reliable I have not independently verified such information and make no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. For questions simply reply to this email.