New in Funding: 🍫 Series B for upcycled cacao

💰 Amsterdam’s Rockstart launched its second AgriFood fund. It is targeting €50 million to support up to 50 early-stage, purpose-driven startups in the next five years.

🥡 Fantuan, based in Vancouver, raised $40 million in a Series C funding round led by VC firm Celtic House Asia. The startup has been working on replicating the experience of Chinese food delivery platforms in the West for the past nine years, and will use the funds to further expand its operations.

🌾 US biotech AgroSpheres secured $25 million Series B funding to “build unprecedented stability in crop biologicals”. Its novel delivery system encapsulates and delivers pesticides to plants in a more targeted approach than traditional methods, helping to reduce pesticide use and avoid biodiversity damage.

🍫 Swiss-Ghanian startup Koa raised $15 million in a Series B funding round led by the Land Degradation Neutrality Fund. It will use the investment to scale its upcycled cacao business - it makes a cacao fruit juice called Koa Pure, alongside a Koa Concentrate 72° (a reduced syrupy version of the juice) and dried cacao fruit powder for other food manufacturers.

🍕 Milano Vice, based in Berlin and founded by two former Delivery Hero execs, raised $9 million Series A funding. Its aim is to deliver “the world's first digitally-powered, delivery-first pizza restaurant concept”, and it will use the funds to expand its model.

🧫 Cultivated meat startup Clever Carnivore raised $7 million in a seed funding round led by Lever VC. It will use the funds to support its expansion plans, as it works towards commercialisation of its cultivated Bratwurst in early 2024.

💨 Dutch fermentation startup Farmless closed its oversubscribed seed round with €4.8 million. It will use the funds to build a pilot plant and accelerate R&D for its climate-friendly functional proteins with a complete amino acid profile, created via a biomass fermentation technique that relies on liquid gases as feedstock.

🏭 Singaporean cultivated meat company Meatiply secured $3.75 million at the first closing of its seed funding round. It will use the funds to scale production of its hybrid products and open a new R&D facility next year.

🪡 HomeCooks, the UK's first marketplace for independent food creators, secured $3.1 million in equity funding to expand its operations and help to rebuild the hospitality industry by becoming the ‘Etsy for food’.

🐾 French startup Carbon Maps raised an additional €3 million in a seed round extension. It is building a software-as-a-service platform focused on the environmental impact of the food industry, helping companies to calculate their environmental footprint at a product level.

💸 New York-based biomanufacturing company Synonym secured investment from Open Philanthropy to further its research into gas fermentation technology for single-cell protein production, and will assess the potential financial benefits of gas fermentation compared to processes that use plant-based carbon sources such as dextrose.

☕️ Beanless coffee company Atomo Coffee, which produces molecular coffee derived from upcycled plant-based ingredients, secured investment from Suntory Holdings Limited. Terms of the investment were not disclosed.

🇵🇭 Philippines-based Mayani, an agri-fisheries platform which connects smallholder farmers and fishers to buyers, secured investment from finance app GCash to “create the Philippines’ largest agri-credit movement to bank the rural unbanked”.