Less than a year after emerging from stealth with an “elegant solution” to scaling cultivated meat by harvesting nutrients from “healthy cows” for its cell culture media, California-based Omeat is operating with a skeleton crew following a turbulent few months during which the founder stepped down as CEO after being accused of creating a hostile working environment. According to one former employee who spoke to AgFunderNews this week, the company “is mostly down to a core science team, so there are maybe fewer than 10 people now down from a peak of almost 50.” Layoffs and cutbacks are increas ..read more

The big foodtech funding news this week is a new raise from Netherlands-based cultivated meat startup Mosa Meat — also known as the creator of the world’s first cultivated beef burger. Fellow Dutch company and cultivated meat creator Meatable unveiled news of its first “sausage” tasting in Europe. Over in the world of alternative materials, Japan’s Spiber raised a big round to scale up production of its eco-textiles made from “brewed protein,” while agtech saw a couple notable fundraises for pesticide alternatives. Image credit: Mosa MeatFoodtech & agtech funding Maastricht-based Mosa Mea ..read more

When Andrew Massaro landed in Homa Bay, Kenya in 2022, he encountered a major contradiction: a region with plenty of fresh water, vast land and people but where food insecurity and poverty run deep. Adjacent to Lake Victoria, the second-largest freshwater lake in the world and the biggest in Africa, Homa Bay had for years known fishing as the only source of economic activity, despite the area’s abundant resources and opportunities. “Kenya ranks as a middle-income nation but in rural Homa Bay there’s nothing to show for the status,” Massaro tells AgFunderNews. In 2022, Massaro decided to help ..read more

Data Snapshot is a regular AgFunderNews feature analyzing agrifoodtech market investment data provided by our parent company, AgFunder. Click here for more research from AgFunder and sign up to our newsletters to receive alerts about new research. Investment in food waste solutions in the US dropped 33% from 2022 to 2023, according to AgFunder’s latest Global AgriFoodTech Investment report, which includes data and analysis from food waste nonprofit ReFED. The decline is in keeping with most other agrifoodtech categories for 2023, a year that included severe correction ..read more

Israel-based precision agtech company Greeneye Technology has raised $20 million to scale up operations in the US, bringing its total funding to date to $45 million. Deep Insight, an Israeli investment company, led the round with participation from existing investors Syngenta Group Ventures, JVP, Orbia Ventures, and Mellanox (now part of Nvidia) founder Eyal Waldman. New investors including Iron Nation and Farmers Business Network founder and former CEO Amol Deshpande also participated. Greeneye will use the funding to scale up its operations in the US and introduce new features and capabili ..read more

[Disclosure: AgFunderNews’ parent company AgFunder is an investor in Alpine Bio.] Nobell Foods—a molecular farming startup engineering plants to produce animal proteins in what it claims is a more sustainable and ultimately more efficient manner—has secured its 10th US patent* and rebranded as Alpine Bio. Founded by Magi Richani in 2016 as Alpine Roads, the San Francisco-based company still plans to launch cheeses featuring its animal-free casein under the Nobell Foods brand, but says it now has a far broader remit, with work progressing on up to 15 proteins that can be expressed in a variety ..read more

[Disclosure: AgFunderNews’ parent company AgFunder is an investor in OlsAro.] OlsAro—a Swedish startup developing wheat varieties resilient to environmental stressors—has raised a €2.5 million ($2.7 million) seed round led by Future Food Fund and PINC, the venture arm of Paulig, with participation by AgFunder, FLORA Ventures, Mudcake, and current investors. The capital will be spent on expanding the team and commercializing OlsAro’s first product, a salt-tolerant wheat variety shown in field trials in Bangladesh to deliver significant increases in yield vs local varieties in saline soil, “ena ..read more

Perfect Day—a pioneer in the ‘animal-free’ dairy space making whey protein via precision fermentation—has been sued by its Italian contract manufacturing partner Olon for breach of contract, fraudulent inducement, and fraudulent concealment. The company declined to comment on a complaint* filed in New York on Friday, which accuses it of stringing Olon along while it “secretly planned” to switch production of beta-lactoglobulin (BLG) to cheaper fermentation facilities in India. According to the complaint, Olon spent six years working with Perfect Day on producing BLG via microbial fermentation ..read more

San Mateo, California-based Mattson, a food and beverage product innovation firm that has worked with some high-profile foodtech startups as well as multinationals, is expanding to the Midwest with the acquisition of Chicago-based Hyde Park Group (HPG). Founded in 2002 by Mary Haderlein and based in West Town, HPG connects clients with top chefs, product developers, and packaging designers, and will enable Mattson, which has expertise in R&D, back-end product development and food science as well as these more front-end capabilities, to broaden its geographical reach. “From an innovation p ..read more

[Disclosure: AgFunderNews’ parent company, AgFunder, is an investor in Hyphen.] Robots—especially the ones with articulated arms that you might see in Tesla plant—are pretty cool, says Hyphen cofounder Stephen Klein, who had his first, “humbling,” encounter with ‘bots at Bay area based ‘robotic coffee bar’ startup Café-X in 2016. But there’s a time and a place, he says. “Turns out you actually don’t need a 30-kilo robotic arm to move a coffee cup.” If you’re operating an assembly line or ‘makeline’ in a fast-casual restaurant or salad bar with a high percentage of online orders, however, gett ..read more