FH Ventures: The Stanford grads domesticating novel strains 🦠

What's happened in vertical farming is happening in cultivated meat and will happen in precision fermentation.

What I mean by that is the winners have already been picked.

The funds that typically would back these companies have already placed their bets. And the pool of early stage capital available to new contenders has mostly been deployed.

The market leaders (e.g. Bowery, Infarm, Plenty or Upside, Future Meat, Mosa) will continue to collect funding from their existing investors, and the later stage institutional investors will follow behind the market leaders.

And in sectors which are capex heavy, pre-revenue and not for the generalist investor - access to later stage funding will be the difference between the winners and losers.

New contenders need incredibly strong differentiation or traction to able to raise up into the later stages - or risk running out of capital.

We've seen this happen in Seed+ vertical farming startups (e.g. no one will touch them), we're seeing this happening in cultivated meat (e.g. hard to raise without strong differentiation), and we'll soon see this in precision fermentation (where funding flew to in the last quarters).

Agree, Disagree, something to add? hit reply 📧

Find below are 5 new startups of the week, 1 new fund, and 3 good reads.

📦 Perfekto (Newly Opened)

📍 HQ: Mexico💸 Raising: $500k USD🙋‍♂️ CEO: Jan Heinvirta👀 Existing investors: Y Combinator, Harvard Management Company, Alan Rutledge, Rhombuz, Lotux, Asymmetry Ventures, Duro Ventures.💡 Pitch: "Perfekto offers a subscription box with imperfect produce, home-delivered. Thereby, customers save time and money while helping to reduce food waste."📈 Traction: 2,200 active customers, $52k in MRR, Delivering 4,600 boxes monthly.

+ Learn More / View Deck / Request Intro

🥓 Thrilling Foods (Newly Opened)

📍 HQ: United States💸 Raising: $500k USD🙋‍♂️ CEO: Jared Hansen👀 Existing investors: Verso Holdings, Sustainable Food Ventures, Ahimsa Foundation.💡 Pitch: "We produce and sell Food Without Sacrifice. We're currently exclusively focused on Bakon™, which we believe is the best-tasting plant bacon in the world, but long-term, we think we have an opportunity to use our patent-pending tech and differentiated brand to create a new kind of global food company."📈 Traction: >150 points of sale, 2022 rev YTD: $177k. #4 alt protein SKU at Erewhon.

+ Learn More / View Deck / Request Intro

🔎 Tocco (Newly Opened)

📍 HQ: France💸 Raising: €500K EUR🙋‍♂️ CEO: Leon Ge👀 Existing investors: Angel round: Accel (via scout); Lightspeed Ventures (Partner); EIT Climaccelerator; Quest Ventures (Partner); Cofounder Printify; CEO of Transport Jumeau💡 Pitch: "Companies suffer from complexity in supplier search and sourcing operations as well as difficulty in managing sustainability and climate in the supply chain - Tocco is building the sustainable infrastructure for SME sourcing in Europe"📈 Traction: Facilitated one transaction between supplier and buy worth of $13'000.

+ Learn More / View Deck / Request Intro

🌾 Yeap (Closing Soon)

📍 HQ: Israel💸 Raising: $1.5M USD in SAFE🙋‍♂️ CEO: Jonathan Goshen👀 Existing investors: Israeli Innovation Authority, TKH- The Strauss group💡 Pitch: "Yeap produces sustainable, nutritious, easy to scale-up, inexpensive yeast-based protein (functional and bulk) made out of spent yeast. A functional protein that can act as egg, soy and milk protein replacement with the ability to bring both functionalities and protein content values at once."📈 Traction: Funding: Agfunder Asia joining, POC: signed with large food manufacturer, Production: already at 100kg scale

+ Learn More / View Deck / Request Intro

🦠 Wild Microbes (Searching Lead)

📍 HQ: USA💸 Raising: $3.5M USD🙋‍♂️ CEO: Tim Wannier (Stanford Grad 🎓)👀 Existing investors: n/a💡 Pitch: "Wild Microbes is building a catalog of exceptional microbes for bio production. We source the best microbes and then domesticate them for the food and materials sectors."📈 Traction: LOI signed for microbe sourcing, $1M in SAFEs raised, advanced discussions with 6 potential customers.

+ Learn More / View Deck / Request Intro

🔥 Popular Last Week

🧫 Yeasty (Just Opened) - Yeasty is producing a sustainable and complete protein-rich ingredient for food manufacturers by reusing an industrial by-product : spent brewers' yeast. Raising €800k EUR

🍖 MEALA (Just Opened) - Developing new ingredients and processes - creating a NON-GMO enzymatic treatment of plant based proteins which bring a super texture and juiciness to plant based.Raising $1.8M USD

🍄 Nordic Umami Co. (Closing Soon) - We are scaling up our natural fermentation tech (patent pending) and creating a model where various side streams can be used to produce natural umami.Raising €2M EUR

+ there's 60 other companies raising now - request an intro if you'd like to chat with their founders.

👀 Fund Spotlight: AENU

👋 Leadership Team: Fabian Heilemann, Ferry Heilemann, Siobhan Brewster, Melina Sánchez Montañés 📆 Founded: 2021📍 Location: Berlin💰 Fund Size: €100M close💡 The idea: “Evergreen impact tech fund with €100m to invest in companies solving the climate crisis and advancing social equality. The fund targets technologies that have the potential to avoid or remove 100 Mt CO2e at scale or significantly improve the quality of life of millions of people. The investment ticket sizes will initially range from €500k up to €5 million."👀 Portfolio inc: Heirloom (carbon capture) Labster (VR-education), Monta (EV-charging), Next Gen Foods (alternative proteins) and XFuel (bio-fuels)

💡 3 Good Reads & Posts

🧬 CRISPR has the potential to change our food and fields. And the global CRISPR technology market was estimated to be worth $2251.21M in 2021. It is expected to grow at a CAGR of 19.45% from 2022 to 2027.

The number of food and agricultural companies testing CRISPR’s promise to make food safer, longer-lasting, less wasteful and healthier - among many other things - are on the up. From non-browning mushrooms to relaxation-inducing tomatoes, the potential applications of CRISPR tech are dizzying.

More on that here.

💸 Funding slowdown? A very good post about how VC management fees work and what their expense structure looks like - or put differently, why great startups shouldn't worry about funding drying up:

🇪🇺 Same news as last year - European FoodTech VC = Delivery startups. Data from DigitalFoodLab.

😅 Bit of Fun

That's what we call "utility"

Thanks for reading today's edition - some of you have been asking how to skip the wait list and access the Ventures platform today - just send us 1-2 good startups you're looking at and we'll grant you access.

And please let me know what did you think of today's edition?

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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.