💸 New in Funding: Europe's newest FoodTech Fund

🧺 Dutch online grocery company Picnic secured €355 million to expand its presence in France and Germany. It delivers lower-cost, own-brand groceries from local distribution warehouses using small electric vans, and uses AI-powered demand forecasting to minimise waste.

💰 Precision fermentation pioneer Perfect Day raised a pre-series E funding round of ‘up to $90 million’ to support its next chapter, and announced that co-founders Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi are stepping down.

🤖 Burro, based in Philadelphia, secured $24 million Series B funding in a round co-led by Catalyst Investors and Translink Capital. It currently has 300 of its robotics systems - which follow people and can autonomously run cargo around, relieving people of strenuous tasks which add little value - operating in fields and nurseries across the US, Australia, and New Zealand, and will use the funds to further expand its operations.

🇮🇸 Iceland’s GeoSalmo, which is focused on advancing land-based salmon farming, raised €13.4 million to support construction of a state-of-the-art hybrid flow-through salmon farm.

🇯🇵 The Japanese government awarded grants worth $19.6 million to two alternative protein startups: plant-based egg company Umami United and cell culture technology firm IntegriCulture.

🌾 Indian agritech Fasal secured $12 million in a Series A funding round led by TDK Ventures and British International Investment. It will use the funds to scale and expand its B2B brand, Fasal Fresh, a precision horticulture platform that leverages AI, crop sciences and IOT to support resource optimisation and farm productivity. 

🍄 Enifer, based in Finland, secured a recycling and reuse investment grant of more than €12 million to build its first commercial-scale PEKILO® mycoprotein ingredient factory. Get a 60-second recap.

🦟 Nasekomo secured €8 million Series A funding to fuel its mission of becoming an AI-assisted Insect Bioconversion leader. It plans to open its first franchised insect protein industrialisation facility in Bulgaria next year, and will use the funds to drive further European expansion.

🐌 British biotech FA Bio raised £5.3 million, in a funding round led by Clean Growth Fund, to help restore the biodiversity of degraded soils and increase crop productivity. It uses its ‘SporSenZ’ technology, a targeted microbial sampling strategy, to collect data and microbial isolates from agricultural fields, then develops the most promising microbes into agricultural bioproducts for the ‘most important crops’ in the global food system.

🇫🇷 Ensemble, the plant-based protein brand by French food processing giant Tereos, secured €4 million from the Co-operative Group to triple the production of its Marckolsheim plant in Alsace this year.

🧀 France’s Standing Ovation received €3 million from the French government and Bpifrance to support its CASPEX project, which aims to produce precision fermentation-derived caseins for novel dairy products at scale.

🥃 Scottish whisky app Bevvy, which allows users to scan the label of any whisky bottle and receive tasting notes as well as valuations, secured $1.5 million seed funding to support its expansion into new market regions.

💰 Kost Capital completed the first close of its targeted €25 million first fund, with which it will support 20-25 pre-seed and seed-stage European startups using renewable biological resources to produce future food solutions. Its portfolio so far includes Estonian palm oil replacement company Äio, French infant formula company Numi, and Denmark’s Nutrumami. Here’s how you can get on their radar.

🇰🇷 Better Foods, a plant-based subsidiary of South Korean retail giant Shinsegae, secured investment from Cleveland Avenue, a VC firm founded and run by a former president & CEO of McDonald’s.