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- FoodTech Weekly #242 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #242 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
April 18, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 14 minutes
In partnership with
#242
Hi there,
Writing these lines from the Swedish Arctic, where I’m skiing this week. It’s been amazing. And it’s just a quick 17 hour train ride from Stockholm. (Or, if you’re Mark Zuckerberg, you take your $330M yacht to northern Norway and heliski into Sweden — to each their own, I guess).
This week's rundown:
💵 $20M for tech that boosts productivity in greenhouses
📈 AgriFoodTech investment in developing markets surges 63% year-over-year
💂 The most disgusting British foods ever
Let's go!
Sponsored content:
This tech company grew 32,481%...
No, it's not Nvidia... It's Mode Mobile, 2023’s fastest-growing software company according to Deloitte.
Just as Uber turned vehicles into income-generating assets, Mode is turning smartphones into an easy passive income source, already helping 45M+ users earn $325M+ through simple, everyday use.
They’ve just been granted their stock ticker by the Nasdaq, and you can still invest in their pre-IPO offering at just $0.26/share — before their share price change on May 1st.
*An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur. Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com.
*The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research.
💰 Funding
🇺🇸 IUNU, which uses autonomous rail-mounted cameras and canopy level sensors to monitor greenhouse efficiency and recommend specific actions to farmers, has harvested $20M in a Series B extension led by S2G Investments.
🇸🇪 OlsAro has banked €2.5M ($2.54M) in pre-seed, led by Future Food Fund and PINC, and joined by AgFunder, FLORA Ventures, Mudcake, and current investors. The startup develops crop varieties that are resilient to environmental stressors; the first product is a salt tolerant wheat, which has a 52% increase in yield compared to competing varieties — enabling farming on otherwise unfarmable land.
🇬🇧 Crop diagnostics startup Fotenix has closed a £2.1M ($2.7M) Seed round, joined by River Capital (equity), EHE Ventures’ AI Growth Fund (equity) and Innovate UK (grant). The company uses multi-spectral imaging, robotics, and AI to create 3D digital twins of crops, enabling growers to spot problems such as disease long before visual symptoms emerge.
🇨🇭Catchfree has reeled in CHF 1.2M ($1.46M) in a Seed round led by FortyOne Group and Stiftung Startfelt. The company develops innovative plant-based seafood alternatives to shrimp, fish burgers, and fish bites made from e.g. rice, soy protein, and algae.
🇺🇸 AI-powered restaurant forecasting startup ClearCOGS has raised $3.8M in Seed funding led by Closed Loop Partners, and joined by Myriad Venture Partners and Level Up Ventures. The company offers predictive analytics to assist operators (e.g. restaurants) to make the right decisions around food prep, ordering, and staffing, especially to help cut food waste and improve efficiency.
🇳🇱 Veridi Technologies has been awarded a €2.5M ($2.84M) grant from the EIT Accelerator. The company has developed an automated platform that aims to make soil biodiversity diagnostics faster, cheaper, and more accessible.
🎙️ Investment Climate: How to get funded in 2025 with Massimo Portincaso of Arsenale BioYards
This week, Alex Shandrovsky met with Massimo Portincaso, CEO and Co-Founder of Arsenale BioYards, which just raised a €10M seed round to tackle one of biotech’s toughest challenges: making biomanufacturing economically viable at scale. Massimo breaks down how his team is redesigning the scale-up process from the ground up—bringing industrial conditions into the lab, leveraging smart cap table construction, and tapping into project finance to build infrastructure without drowning in dilution.
Top three findings from this conversation:
Solve for Scale Early — Biotech is Infrastructure-Heavy. ‘What we're doing on the industrial side is that we're not doing the classical scale-up as everybody else, but we're doing scale-out. So we manage to do what we're doing by identifying one size, which will be around 50,000 liters, containerize it, and then if you need more capacity, we simply build more bioreactors.’
Convince VCs You’re More Than Hardware. The business is more than pipes and tanks. It’s a data platform for smarter biomanufacturing with guaranteed scale-up success.
Strategic Cap Tables are Built, Not Hoped For. Massimo curated a cap table of US and EU institutional VCs, vertical farming founders, industrial family offices, and bioindustry operators. ‘I wanted smart money—family offices, industrial know-how, and institutional money together.’
🧐 Noteworthy
🌍 A new AgFunder report, the 2025 Developing Markets AgriFoodTech Investment Report, shows that AgriFoodTech investment in developing markets reached $3.7B in 2024, surging 63% year-over-year, despite a global 4% decline in AgriFoodTech funding in general.
🏦 Hatch Blue has secured a $1.5M investment for its Accelerator Fund II from Oceana.
😈 The meat industry (specifically, the Animal Agriculture Alliance, consisting of e.g. Cargill and Smithfield Foods) paid PR firm Red Flag to fuel backlash against the 2019 EAT-Lancet report, before it was even published, as it recommended reduced meat consumption in certain geographies.
📄 A new report by Lever VC claims that cultivated meat is becoming increasingly viable.
🆕 What’s new on RethinkX’s Periodic Table of Precision Fermentation?
🥚 Eat Just is launching its plant-based egg in Europe after striking a distribution deal with Vegan Food Group, which has invested £11.25M ($15M) to build a production line for Just Egg in Lüneburg, Germany.
💲FoodTech VC firm PeakBridge has announced four new seed-stage investments: plant-based ice cream maker GanEden; functional mushroom extract co KÄÄPÄ Biotech; culinary digitization platform SOUS; and gut-friendly botanicals firm Evinature.
🌍 News from the FoodTech Weekly community
👨🏻💻 Saveggy (🇸🇪) is hiring a Technical Engineer… Project Eaden (🇩🇪) is looking for a Founders Associate… Essential (🇰🇪) is recruiting a Nutrition Consultant… ReFED (🇺🇸) is on the hunt for a Director of Policy… NitroCapt (🇸🇪) has an opening for a Microwave Application Engineer.
🏆 Global Call for Startups is a global competition for early-stage ventures aimed at building a healthy, sustainable and just food system. Apply by April 30. Winners will be invited to attend EAT Stockholm Food Forum, Oct 3-4, and gain access to investors, residency programs, networks, and strategic resources from Antler, Katapult, and Norrsken.
🎤 HackSummit returns to Lausanne on May 15-16, bringing together top Climate Builders, Investors, Scientists, and Operators to double down on Climate Deep Tech. Across two action-packed days, expect game-changing talks, rapid-fire pitches, hands-on workshops, and city-wide side events to accelerate investment into impact. Save 20% with discount code FOODTECHWEEKLY when you book your place.
🌊 Hatch Blue is seeking high-impact, early-stage companies to join the CREST accelerator and unlock the next wave of innovation in aquaculture and the sustainable blue economy. Ideal applicants are management-owned companies with technologies that foster ecological sustainability, 12 months of runway, and platform technologies with wide applications across species and sectors. Apply now.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
🎲 Random Stuff
😢 The crops no one will ever buy.
⏰️ Researchers in Japan have tested whether chewing along to a metronome could help people slow down their eating habits, as previous studies have shown that people who eat quickly often consume more calories before their body has time to signal that it’s full.
🧻 The corporate quest to make better toilet paper.
🤢 From snail water, jellied eels, and repotted birds to fish curry ice cream, brown Windsor soup and mock banana sandwiches: The most disgusting British foods ever, ranked by a historian.
I love you.
Daniel
- - -
🎵 This issue was produced while listening to Don’t Let It Pass by Junip.
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Sponsored content:
Apple Is Coming for the Smart Home — And Fast
Apple’s rumored Face-ID door lock and smart display hub are more than just new products. It’s a clear signal: they’re going all-in on smart home automation.
The tech giant is doubling down on the smart home, the $158B industry that’s growing 23% annually.
And with Apple’s entry, investors are looking for the next breakout company - and potential acquisition target.
They’re chasing Google (acquired Nest, $3.2B) and Amazon (acquired Ring, $1.2B).
History shows: when Apple plays catch-up, they go big.
And there’s one startup perfectly positioned to benefit.
With 10+ patents, distribution in over 100 Best Buy stores, and a Home Depot launch in 2025, RYSE is built for a breakout.
Early investors in Ring and Nest saw life-changing returns.
Now, RYSE is open at just $1.90/share.
Past performance is not indicative of future results. Email may contain forward-looking statements. See US Offering for details. Informational purposes only.