FH Ventures: 5 FoodTech's Raising Now

Hey There,Last week we launched our survey to find the best FoodTech VC of 2022.

Over 120+ founders have filled in the form - ranking VC's based on the diligence process, founder friendliness, value-add and more.

Whilst you sadly can't vote for yourself (though some have tried 👀) there's no foul play in sharing the form with your portfolio startups and asking them to cast in their vote.

The results will be announced on stage at FoodTech IL, and across all FoodHack channels on November 7th.

The early responses have been, interesting...

p.s. Tomorrow we announce the line-up of 12 selected Demo Day startups here

🌳 Forested (Ingredients Insetting Marketplace)

📍 HQ: Ethiopia💸 Raising: $1.5M USD🙋‍♀️ CEO: Ariana Day Yuen👀 Existing investors: - Seth Goldman- Mulago Foundation- GIZ- Packard Foundation💡 Pitch: "Forested exists to scale-up the untapped commercial opportunity to conserve forests. They're building a data-backed ingredients insetting marketplace connecting CPG brands with rural networks of forest producers across the Global South so buyers can secure their critical raw materials while accessing eco-credits, starting with carbon."📈 Traction:- "Launched Maryiza, global supply chain of Ethiopian forest honey which earned press from Bon Appétit, The New York Times' Front Burner, and Esquire. - Expanded into bulk/wholesale ingredients supply, built a honey and beeswax processing factory, a team of 15, and a contract farming model that supports the livelihoods of ~1,000 smallholder farmers. - Forested has secured world-class buyers and leaders in the regenerative agriculture space including the global cosmetics brand Lush Cosmetics (the team is fulfilling their first ingredients order for this product)"+ View Deck / Learn More

 🥖 Krumbs  (Re-Shaping Bread At-Home)

📍 HQ: Germany💸 Raising: $1-1.5M USD🙋‍♂️ CEO: Julius Ruessmann👀 Existing investors: - Backbone Ventures- Peter bruun- Amber invest- Christoph goeken💡 Pitch: "Rethinking bread from sourcing to consumption - providing the best bread experience on the market for consumers and the environment. Defining a new bread category, called Fresh-at-Home, that creates a uniquely indulgent bread experience, while at the same time helps consumers to reduce bread food waste hassle-free."📈 Traction:- "We have assembled an interdisciplinary and strong team - Completed product development- Are ready for production at scale- Have built a unique multi-channel love brand and entered conversations with leading q-com players for a listing."

+ View Deck / Learn More

🧫 Magic Valley  (Next-Gen Cultivated Meat)

📍 HQ: Australia💸 Raising: $3M USD🙋‍♂️ CEO: Paul Bevan👀 Existing investors: - SFV- Siddhi Capital- Brinc- Animoca Brands💡 Pitch: "In order to sustainably meet the future protein demands of our expanding global population, Magic Valley is developing healthy and delicious cultivated meat products that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 92%, improve human health and save the lives of 70 Billion animals per annum.."📈 Traction:- "World's first cultivated lamb prototypes from iPSC (completely FBS and animal product-free)."

+ View Deck / Learn More

🌱 UMAMI (Bionic Farming Company)

📍 HQ: Switzerland💸 Raising: CHF 6 Mio.🙋‍♂️ CEO: Robin Bertschinger👀 Existing investors:- n/a💡 Pitch: "Umami is a bionic farming company specialising in growing pure food with superior taste. We eliminate resource exploitation and toxic practices of agriculture by recirculating resources, fostering biodiversity and growing locally in closed biospheres."📈 Traction:- "Proof of concept & proof of market- Biggest 2 retailers in Switzerland as customers- Break Even Operations- 3 systems built so far - replicable, scalable defensible tech"

+ View Deck / Learn More

🐄 Zero Cow Factory (Animal-Free Dairy)

📍 HQ: India💸 Raising: $4M USD🙋‍♂️ CEO: Sohil Kapadia👀 Existing investors: - Brinc + Artesian VC💡 Pitch: "We are reinventing the meaning of traditional dairy and food industry by producing India's first animal-free milk protein and dairy products (certainly a world's first A2 milk protein) using bioengineering the microbes & precision fermentation."📈 Traction:- "(1) First company to work on animal-free A2 milk protein (Patented).- (2) First and only company to work on bovine called Bos indicus (Patented). - (3) Technology focused company and not a food company. Working on most complex protein Casein and started pilot scale process. - (4) Optimizing to reach a lowest protein production cost up to USD 20/Kg by 2025. - (12) Half of the seed round is already committed by global VC's and food companies.""

+ View Deck / Learn More

🔥 Popular Last Week

♻️ Kly (Upcycled Sustainable Ingredients) - "Swiss upcycling start-up turning food waste into healthy and sustainable ingredients through fermentation. Our first ingredient is Sustaingrain, a wheat bran sourdough for everyday bakery products."Raising: 350k CHF

🍄 Niskus Biotec (Solid State Fermentation) - "Leveraging scaled up solid state fermentation process to provide food companies a new generation of sustainable functional food ingredients that are nutritious, healthy & natural. Niskus first ingredient product range is MycoGrain, a gourmet mushroom mycelium-based protein rich flour."Raising: $1M USD

🧀 ReThink Cheese (Vegan Cheese) - "We developed the world’s first cheese based onorganic faba bean milk. Our cubes, slices and shreds melt, brown nicely, and are mouth-watering delicious."Raising: $1M USD

💸 Funding Spotlight: GOURMEY

📆 Founded: 2019🙋‍♂️ Founders: Nicolas Morin-Forest (CEO), Victor Sayous (CTO), Antoine Davydoff💡 Pitch: Paris-based Gourmey raised €48m Series A (apparently a world largest for cultivated meat) to build Europe’s largest cultivated meat hub. The French startup is developing cell-cultured, "slaughter-free" foie gras and out to convince even the most picky chefs to make the switch to cultivated.👀 Investors inc. Earlybird (lead), Keen Venture Partners, Heartcore Capital, Point Nine Capital, Air Street Capital, Partech, Discovery, Omnes Capital, Eutopia, Beyond Investing and Singapore-based Thia Ventures.

💡 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.

🍦 Ice Cream Innovations: Summer may be over, and the hardest months may be ahead for this category - but who really can say no to a good chocolate fondant and a scoop of vanilla ice cream on a cold winter day.

With that image in mind - here's the 50+ companies innovating on our frozen indulgences.

📊 Interesting Data: From Patrick Ryan, co-founder of SPV platform Odin that looks at portfolio performance vs number of investments. TLDR: most VC's would be better off just indexing their portfolio than trying to hand-pick the best investment opportunities because truly, we're not all that smart. Full read here.

Now if only there was someone creating an index fund of early stage Climate and Health startups 🤐

🌴 Good Read: Alt-Fats took off in 2022, with companies like Zero Acre Farms coming out of Stealth with a $37M raise to replace seed oils with cultivated options, European FoodTech's like Melt&Marble raising €5M for fermentation-derived beef fat and companies like No Palm Ingredients raking up a number of awards (inc. best pitch at FoodHack Summit) for their alternatives to palm oil.

What's driving the alt-fats boom and why is innovation here so much needed? We spoke with Anna Ottosson, Founding Partner at Trellis Road to find out more:

🐇 Watch: One of the strangest video I’ve seen in awhile is this one on how Lindt Gold Bunnies are made, narrated (of course) by one of the bunnies himself.

📈 Price Changes (USA specific): In a country where Healthcare and Education continues to increase, but TV's and Clothings become more affordable - it can start to make you question if anyone's really taken the time to think any of this through.

😅 Bit of Fun

The trick of being a great VC is having the ability to aggressively switch opinions without the blink of an eye.

Thanks for reading, see you next week at the Demo Day and feel free to forward this to a Food/Climate investor who might enjoy the read too.

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

😁 Love It 😐 Meh 😕 Hate it

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

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.