FH Ventures: The 3 Demo Day Winners

Hey There,

Thanks to the 200+ Investors who joined us at the third edition of the FoodHack Demo Day !

In this weeks edition we'll be spotlighting the 3 winners, along with a few runner-ups who we think you should have your eyes on.

For those that missed the event - you can find the full recording here for your weekend watch 📹

We'll be investing in several of these companies with HackCapital (you can apply to join today to start angel investing in Food/Climate startups alongside top tier VC's).

Past events have seen startups close their rounds within 6 weeks, so let's jump in...

🦠 Wild Microbes (Winner: Best Pitch)

📍 HQ: USA💸 Raising: $3M USD🙋‍♂️ CEO: Tim Wannier (Microbial synthetic biology at Harvard, Biology from Caltech)👀 Existing investors: Nucleate, Petri. 💡 Pitch: "Empowering the bio economy by providing exceptional microbial hosts for production. Using cutting-edge technology to develop new microbial chasses, making scaling sustainable products faster and cheaper than ever."📈 Traction:- $1.3M prize money secured,- Members/Winners of Nucleate, Activate Fellowship, Petri Award, Alpine Social Ventures, Rabobank-MIT competition, Vectors Capital BioInnovation Challenge.- LOI signed with first partner. 👉 Request an intro to the founder

📹 Watch the pitch:

🧫 PoLoPo (Winner: Highest Impact Potential)

📍 HQ: Israel💸 Raising: $1M USD🙋‍♀️ CEO: Maya Sapir-Mir (prev. Head Bio-Botanic Unit, eSense-lab)👀 Existing investors: CPT Capital💡 Pitch: "PoLoPo is a science based FoodTech startup developing plant bio-factories for high scale production of real animal proteins in plants. PoLoPo have a novel approach to growing egg proteins by using molecular farming with potatoes, a very sustainable and durable plant."📈 Traction:- "Term sheet signed with top-tier FoodTech VC who's leading the round.- 2022 Coller startup Foodtech track winners - securing funding from CPT Capital.- MassChallenge Israel and Modern Agriculture Foundation 2022 Better Plate Track winners."

👉 Request an intro to the founder

📹 Watch the pitch:

🍫 WNWN Food Labs (Winner: Most Likely to Oversubscribe)

📍 HQ: United Kingdom💸 Raising: $8M USD🙋‍♀️ CEO: Ahrum Pak (ex-Morgan Stanley, Korelya Capital)👀 Existing investors: FoodLabs💡 Pitch: "WNWN Food Labs is an ingredients company using fermentation to create a suite of alt-ingredients, that are ethical, sustainable and resilient to climate shock and food security issues. WNWN Food Labs’ fermentation technology has enabled them to create a full range of ethical, sustainable and resilient alternative ingredients to produce chocolate"📈 Traction:- "First alt-choc to the market- First product drop released in May 2022, sold out in <24 hours, second drop sold out in <12 hours- Scaled up from 5kg/month to 700kg/month of alt-choc capacity within 1 year - Featured in Green Queen, Vegconomist, Forbes, BBC, Sustainable Brands"

👉 Request an intro to the founder

📹 Watch the pitch:

🧪 Arda Biomaterials (Runner Up)

📍 HQ: United Kingdom💸 Raising: £750k GBP🙋‍♂️ CEO: Brett Cotten (author of "Gene-Trepreneur")👀 Existing investors: CPT Capital, Entrepreneur First 💡 Pitch: "Transforming waste into valuable, circular biomaterials and pioneering new manufacturing systems to make them. Our first product is transforming beer into leather (brewery waste is a common animal feedstock – we just skip the cow and transform straight to alt leather)."📈 Traction:- "Funding through EF. - Won investment from CPT Capital at alt protein pitch competition at Cambridge- Lab set up and rapid prototyping underway- Achieved a material tensile strength of material 4 Mpa (first prototypes were 0.4 Mpa – 10 times improvement"

👉 Request an intro to the founder

📹 Watch the pitch:

🍄 Kynda Biotech (Runner Up)

📍 HQ: Germany💸 Raising: €2-3M🙋‍♂️ CEO: Daniel MacGowan-von Holstein (Exited his last company to PE firm)👀 Existing investors: FoodLabs, Shio Cap, Sustainable Food Ventures, Better Ventures💡 Pitch: "Empowering food producers to drastically reduce their carbon footprint. We use biomass fermentation to produce mycelium, the "roots" of a fungi using local by- products of the food industry and our strain."📈 Traction:- "Scaled fermentation capacity from 20 to 300 liters.- Built own research lab and a team of 9 with core technical competencies. - Planning of production facility near Hamburg (Lease for 6000sq site will be signed in October 22)."

👉 Request an intro to the founder

📹 Watch the pitch:

👩🏻‍🔬 Mycolever (Runner up + coming out of Stealth)

📍 HQ: Germany💸 Raising: $3.5M USD🙋‍♀️ CEO: Dr. Britta Winterberg (Formerly co-founder & CSO at Formo)👀 Existing investors: n/a💡 Pitch: "Traditional expression systems, e.g. yeasts, bacteria and filamentous fungi, are often unsuitable for high-yield low-cost production of alternative proteins for food. Mycolever develops a new fungal expression platform for the production of alternative proteins."📈 Traction:- "A fully sequenced genome as well as a large molecular toolbox is available for Mycolever's fungal species. - It has been used in research to express proteins."

👉 Request an intro to the founder

📹 Watch the pitch:

💡 Quick Reads

👋 Meet IRL - FoodHack Meetups are coming up across the globe in Madrid (October 17th), Sofia (October 25th), Stockholm (October 26th) and our USA expansion kicks off with a big event planned in Stanford (Oct 27th).

As always, free to attend - and the best place to meet FoodTech Founders & Investors in your area.

📈 Energy Anxiety: With news of rising energy costs all around, I got a little spooked and asked what other investors were thinking too:

🇮🇸 Good Read: Related to the above, should we all just move to Iceland? I caught up with Chris from Loki Foods, the first Icelandic alt-protein startup that's leveraging a 100% renewable energy grid, to learn more about why Climate founders should consider relocation to Iceland.

The craziest insight:

📈 Alt-Data: New analysis from Synthesis Capital suggests alternative protein and vegan meat is in the early phase of an “S” adoption curve and, by the next decade, there will likely be a tipping point.

📉 VC data: CB Insights released their 262-page State of Venture Q3'33 report, here's the TLDR:

• Global funding fell to the lowest levels since Q2’20.

• The $74.5B was -34% vs. the prior quarter.

• Total deals declined by 10% quarter-over-quarter — also to the lowest level since 2020.

• Just 25 unicorns (startups valued at $1B+) were born in Q3 — the levels last seen pre-pandemic.

• The top 10 investors in venture changed dramatically. In fact, 2021’s #1 most active investor fell out of the top 10 altogether.

😅 Bit of Fun

This article has been making the rounds, apparently some VC's are hiring ghostwriters to gain Twitter clout 🤷‍♂️ I can assure this email was not written by ghostwriters, but here's a few tweets that were...

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend ahead.

As always - let me know what did you think of today's edition?

😁 Love It 😐 Meh 😕 Hate it

Arman Anatürk Co-Founder & CEO @FoodHack (HackCapital)

Disclaimer: ‍Investing in startups and early stage businesses involves risks, including illiquidity, lack of dividends, loss of investment and dilution. This communication is intended for experienced investors, with sufficient experience and knowledge to understand the processes and risks involved. Do your DD, make your own decisions, invest aware, your capital is at risk.