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Funding

Red Sea Farms Raises an Additional $6M to Grow Crops With Saltwater

Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Farms has raised an additional $6 million in pre-Series A funding, bringing the total round to $16 million (h/t Wamda). Those leading the round include Aramco’s venture arm Wa’ed, the Saudi government-owned Future Investment Initiative (FII) Institute, KAUST, Global Ventures, AppHarvest, and Bonaventure. The $6 million announced over the weekend follows an initial $10 million investment the company unveiled in June of this year.

Red Sea Farms, which is based out of King Abdullah University for Science & Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, is developing a grow system for crops that relies primarily on saltwater as the primary irrigation input. As company cofounder and CSO Prof. Mark Tester told The Spoon recently, the system works on both crops grown traditionally via land and those grown indoors using hydroponics. The idea is to provide more resource options for farmers in parts of the world where freshwater is less abundant. The company’s technology can use saltwater for evaporative cooling in greenhouses, which could potentially cut a facility’s carbon footprint.

Red Sea Farms currently has three grow sites, all in Saudi Arabia. The pre-Series A round of funding will help the company expand its operations in Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Middle East, as well as explore opportunities in the U.S. “where growing conditions are harsh.”

A number of companies have announced crop innovations for the Middle East region this year, including iFarm’s partnership with Sadarah Partners in Qatar and AeroFarms’ developing a R&D hub in the UAE. Also in 2021, Estonian automated gardening company Natufia announced its relocation to Saudi Arabia. Most of these developments are in response to a rising urgency around global food security coupled with a need to reduce the planet’s over-reliance on traditional agriculture resources (e.g., freshwater, land).

Red Sea Farms says it can cut freshwater consumption of farming operations by by 85 to 90 percent through its grow system.

Bite Ninja Raises $675,000 in Pre-Seed Funding to Virtually Staff Restaurants

Bite Ninja, which allows restaurants to virtually staff drive-thrus and counters, has raised $675,000 in Pre-Seed funding. TechCrunch was first to report the news, writing that the round was led by Y Combinator, AgFunder and Manta Ray.

The basic gist of Bite Ninja is that it allows restaurant workers to take drive-thru and counter orders remotely. Instead of managing staffers, restaurants get access to a pool of gig workers (called “ninjas”) managed and scheduled by Bite Ninja. Since these workers take orders remotely (from their own homes, for example), these workers don’t actually show up to the restaurant for their shift.

From the customer’s perspective, little changes about the order-pay-collect process. Someone placing a drive-thru order interacts with a remote worker whose face appears on a screen in the drive-thru lane. The customer may not even know the worker is offsite. Bite Ninja says this method can actually increase order accuracy and upsell rates for restaurants.

Bite Ninja is coming along at a time when the restaurant industry is in the midst of a labor crunch and struggling to find workers. Bite Ninja’s platform can help alleviate this issue by allowing QSRs to staff up on demand without going through the process of hiring and training a worker. Another benefit in these pandemic times is that by shifting some of the order taking to a virtual staffer, more social distance can be created in the back of house because there is one less person on-site. For workers, Bite Ninja opens up new work opportunities because they can pull shifts in different restaurants and time zones from the comfort of their home.

As the pandemic pushed people out of dining rooms and into off-premises meal formats, restaurants have needed to modernize their drive-thru operations. Bite Ninja is among a number of companies that are looking to make drive-thrus both faster and more accurate. Other startups, such as ConverseNow and Valyant AI are building artificial intelligence agents that can take orders from people using natural language.

Bite Ninja Co-Founder Will Clem will actually be speaking about his business and the future of QSRs at our Restaurant Tech Summit next week. And just like one of his company’s ninjas, you can attend virtually from your couch, so grab your ticket today!

WoodSpoon Raises $14M to Expand its Home Chef Marketplace

WoodSpoon, the New York City-based online marketplace where home chefs can make their food available for ordering and on-demand delivery, announced today that it has raised a $14 million Series A round of funding. Restaurant Brands International (RBI) led the round with participation from World Trade Ventures, Victor Lazarte and other individual investors. This brings the total amount of funding raised by WoodSpoon to $16 million.

WoodSpoon is part of a slowly but steadily rising movement of startups such as DishDivvy and Shef that enable home cooks to sell their wares online. WoodSpoon vets potential home cooks for safety, sanitation and food quality before admitting them on to the platform. Once a chef is onboarded, WoodSpoon takes care of the logistics like insurance and delivery, and even helps with things like food photos and videos to better tell chefs’ stories. WoodSpoon currently operates in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens in New York City, where users download the WoodSpoon app or visit the website, order a meal and have it delivered in 30 to 40 minutes.

Oren Saar, Co-Founder and CEO of WoodSpoon told me during a video chat last week that the company currently has 150 active home chefs on its platform (“active” means they’ve cooked meals for sale two times in the past month). Saar also said that 35 percent of customers who buy their first meal on WoodSpoon buy an additional three meals on the service within 17 days.

Selling home-cooked meals is still very much a new idea, and regulations are still being worked out on a state-by-state basis. Because of this, Saar said that WoodSpoon puts a lot of effort into educating potential customers about the idea of buying your neighbor’s home cooked meals. Part of that process, Saar said, was putting the chefs front and center, highlighting the home cooks themselves and the kitchens where meals are made. “You can read everything about the chef making your food,” Saar said, “That should reduce the automatic bias.”

WoodSpoon’s funding is the second big raise we’ve seen from a home cook marketplace this summer, as Shef raised $20 million in June. Shef is a little different from WoodSpoon however, as Shef isn’t on-demand. It delivers prepared meals cold that are then heated up by the customer.

With its new capital, Saar said that WoodSpoon will expand to cover all of New York City before moving on to be in up to 15 different markets across the U.S. Worth noting about this funding round is that it’s led by RBI, which owns the famous QSR brands Burger King, Popeye’s and Tim Horton’s. RBI’s involvement could possibly help accelerate regulatory clarity and acceptance of legalized home cooking across the country, and perhaps it could even help create mini home cook moguls go from neighborhood business to national brand.

Plant-based Cheesemaker Miyoko’s Creamery Raises $52M Series C

Miyoko’s Creamery, which makes plant-based cheese and butter, announced today that it has raised $52 million in Series C funding. PowerPlant Partners led the round, putting in $40 million, with participation from Cult Capital, Obvious Ventures, Stray Dog and CPT Capital.

Miyoko’s makes a range of vegan dairy products including cultured butter, mozzarella, cheese slices, artisanal cheese wheels and cheese spreads made from fermented plant-milks. The company’s products are currently available in 30,000 stores across the U.S., Canada, South Africa, Hong Kong and Singapore. With its new funding, Miyoko’s said it will advance both its distribution and product innovation to get “higher nutrient density, performance and flavor.”

According to the Good Food Institute (GFI), the plant-based butter category grew 36 percent from 2019 to 2020 and the category is now worth $275 million in the U.S. GFI data also shows the market for plant-based cheese is even greater with sales of those products growing 42 percent from 2019 to 2020 to make that category worth $270 million.

And where there are growing sales, there are also startups creating products to sell. Miyoko’s is among a rising co-hort of companies offering new and improved plant-based cheeses. Nobell Foods just came out of stealth mode a couple weeks back and announced it has raised $75 million. Stockeld Dreamery launched its first feta-like plant-based cheese in Sweden in May. And Grounded Foods‘ vegan cheese sauce and spread is available for purchase as well.

In its funding announcement today, Miyoko’s said that this year it will launch a liquid pizza mozzarella that pours out like sauce and bakes up into stretchy cheese. The company is also working on a reformulation of its Medium Cheddar and Pepper Jack cheeses.

Spoon founder Mike Wolf sat down with Miyoko’s Creamery Founder, Miyoko Schinner a few months back to talk about her fascinating backstory, which includes run-ins with both the Japanese mafia and a legal battle with the state of California.

Estonia: Ride Hailing Startup Bolt Raises €600M to Get Into Grocer Delivery

Bolt, an Uber-like rideshare company based in Estonia, has raised €600 million (~$713M USD) to branch out into grocery delivery, CNBC reported today. New investors in the round include Sequoia and fund managers Tekne and Ghisallo, along with existing investors G Squared, D1 Capital and Naya. With its new funding, Bolt is now valued at roughly $4.75 billion.

Just like Uber, Bolt saw its ride hailing business decimated by the pandemic last year. Bolt told CNBC that while its ride hailing business has recovered, the company has seen dramatic growth in its grocery delivery business. The company operates 15-minute grocery delivery and has plans to roll the service out to 10 more European countries including Sweden, Portugal and Croatia over the next few months.

But as it does expand its grocery delivery footprint, Bolt will be facing a fiercely competitive, well-funded landscape. Europe in particular has been a hot spot for grocery delivery this past year, with a number of startups bulking up their warchests with hundreds of millions in new funding. Spanish startup Glovo has raised $1.2 billion, Turkey-based Getir has raised $1 billion, Czech-based Rohlik has raised $402 million, and Germany-based Flink has raised $304 million.

The big question now looming for all these services is whether they can economically scale, a matter complicated by the fact that services such as 15-minute grocery delivery are fast becoming a commodity. If there are half a dozen speedy grocery delivery services in a city, customers will likely gravitate towards the cheapest option. This race to the bottom is driving some speedy grocery delivery services here in the U.S. to diversify more into ghost kitchens and private label ready-to-eat meals.

It’s also worth noting that here in the U.S., Uber is investing more heavily in the grocery delivery space. The company recently acquired the remaining 47 percent of grocery delivery startup Cornershop, and partnered with Albertsons to offer grocery delivery in 400 U.S. cities.

Gopuff Confirms Latest $1B Funding Round

Gopuff announced today that it has raised another $1 billion in funding, confirming reports from last week of just such a round. New investors Blackstone’s Horizon platform, Guggenheim Investments, Hedosophia, MSD Partners, and Adage Capital joined with existing investors Fidelity Management and Research Company, Softbank Vision Fund 1, Atreides Management, and Eldridge in the round.

The new money comes just months after Gopuff raised $1.5 billion, in March of this year. With this new haul, Gopuff has now raised $3.4 billion in total and has a $15 billion valuation.

According to a press announcement emailed to The Spoon, Gopuff will use the new money fuel its geographic expansion across North America and further into the UK and Europe. Gopuff currently operates 450 facilities operating in more than 850 cities across the U.S.

Here in the U.S., Gopuff’s massive fundraising this year far surpasses the comparatively paltry sums raised by its speedy grocery delivery competition. JOKR is a distant second with $170 million, Fridge No More raised $15.4 million, Food Rocket raised $2 million and 1520 has raised an undisclosed seed round.

Gopuff will face more stiff competition as they spread across Europe. The speedy grocery delivery scene there is a little more mature — and better funded than their U.S. counterparts. Spain-based Glovo has raised $1.2 billion, Turkey-based Getir raised $1 billion, and Germany-based Gorillas has raised $335.4 million. (Side note: if you want to raise funding for you speedy grocery delivery startup, start your company name with the letter “G.”) And that doesn’t include all the other players like Flink, Weezy, and Jiffy.

But Gopuff isn’t just expanding its footprint. The company is also branchig beyond straight up grocery delivery and into pre-made meals. Gopuff officially launched Gopuff Kitchen last week, and is already serving hot pizza, chicken tenders, salads, coffees and more in cities like Austin, Miami, Nashville, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and San Antonio.

The speedy grocery delivery started in earnest this year. And with $2.5 billion raised in the past six months, Gopuff has armed itself to try and finish them.

Basil Street Using Equity Crowdfunding to Raise $20M for its Pizza Vending Machines

Pizza vending machine company Basil Street announced this week that it is raising its Regulation A+ round of financing through equity crowdfunding. The company is looking to raise $20 million on the SeedInvest platform, where reservations to invest in Basil St. are currently open.

Basil Street makes what it calls Automated Pizza Kitchens (APK), which are standalone vending machines that serve up hot pizza. The APKs are roughly 20 sq. ft. and hold 150 frozen 10-inch, thin-crust pizzas. When a customer places an order via the touchscreen or mobile app, the APK heats the pizza up using a non-microwave oven that cooks the pies in about three minutes.

That Basil Street is choosing the crowdfunding route isn’t too surprising since the company has yet to take traditional VC funding. According to the prospectus on SeedInvest, Basil Street raised $3.5 million in a convertible note in 2018, followed by three tranches of a Series A round from private investors between Feb. 2020 and Jan. 2021, totaling $8.99 million.

In a video chat this week, I asked Basil Street Chairman and CEO Deglin Kenealy why he’s turning to the crowd for funding instead hitting up VCs. “When you have someone come along and write a big check. It’s too far an advantage for the check writer,” he replied.

But Kenealy also echoed a more intangible sentiment that we hear from other startups like Piestro and Blendid about going the equity crowdfunding route. “We’ll get 7,000 or so investors. Those people will become cheerleaders,” he said, “I’ve got people who are invested in the business and helping us drive it forward.”

Like others in the vending machine space, Basil Street is looking to place its machines in high-traffic areas such as military bases, hospitals, universities, and factories. Basil Street has been running pilot programs and Kenealy said the company is signing deals right now that will put 50 machines in the field this Fall.

During its pilot program, Kenealy said that the company has learned a bunch of information from actual customer interaction. One thing the company learned in particular was about menus. Kenealy said that when the machine is placed in a closed location like a factory, where the same people use the machine every day, menu rotation and adding new items (like a breakfast pizza) is important. But when a machine is in an open location like an airport, where lots of people come and go, menu items can pretty much stay the same.

While Basil Street is turning to the crowd to finance its future, the market itself is getting crowded with competitors. There are a number of pizza vending machines already at market or on their way including API Tech, PizzaForno, Bake Xpress and Piestro. But, given how many locations just in the U.S. alone where a pizza vending machine could work, there’s actually room for plenty of players.

Any investment carries with it risk, but for those interested in plunking down money to own a piece of Basil Street’s pie business, the share price will be $2.82, and the minimum investment is $998.

NovoNutrients Raises $4.7M to Complete Its Pilot Program for Alt-Protein Made from CO2 Inputs

NovoNutrients, a company that creates protein from CO2 inputs, today announced a $4.7 million fundraise to complete its industrial pilot program that will capture CO2 emissions from from oil, gas, and cement-related plants.

The round was led by Happiness Capital, a Hong Kong-based venture firm that has previously invested in Redefine Meat, Ynsect, and Beyond Meat. E2JDJ and Marinya Capital also joined the round, which included re-ups from SOSV’s IndieBio and the Grantham Environmental Trust. Other investors include Stanford Graduate School of Business Impact Fund, Purple Orange Ventures, and Joyance Partners.

NovoNutrients feeds the CO2 inputs it collects to naturally occurring microbes via a fermentation process. The resulting proteins have a variety of uses, including as ingredients in meat analogues as well as animal feeds. NovoNutrients says its protein can improve the amino acid profile of food products.

That nutrition element will work in NovoNutrients favor as it continues to develop its air protein and looks to scale production. At the recent IFT FIRST event, panelists suggested that while a lot of the focus in meat analogues right now is on taste and texture, the nutritional profile of proteins will become more important to consumers moving forward.  

Actually getting a product to consumers is still a ways off for NovoNutrients, however. For the time being, the company is focused on showing its fermentation tech can work at scale. The company will co-locate its bioreactors (aka fermentation tanks) at industrial sites that produce high levels of greenhouse gases. 

The pilot project is focused on a 1,000-liter bioreactor. NovoNutrients says it will stand up a 20,000-liter industrial demo in the near future. 

NovoNutrients is one of a few companies now developing novel protein from CO2, hydrogen, and other air inputs. Others include Air Protein, Solar Foods, and Deep Branch. Last year, the European Space Agency started working with Solar Foods to develop the technology for use in space to feed astronauts.

NovoNutrients said today that its pilot project will allow the company to start raising Series A funding later this year.  

ConverseNow Raises $15M for Restaurant AI Assistant Tech

ConverseNow, which makes an AI ordering assistant for restaurants, announced today that it has rasied a $15 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Craft Ventures with participation from existing investors including LiveOak Venture Partners, Tensility Venture Partners, Knoll Ventures, Bala Investments, 2048 Ventures and Bridge Investments. This brings the total amount of funding raised by ConverseNow to $18.3 million.

ConverseNow’s lead product is its voice-based assistants dubbed George and Becky. These automated assistants can understand and take orders from customers who simply say what they want as they pull up to a restaurant’s drive-thru. During a recent video chat, ConverseNow Founder and CEO Vinay Shukla told me that the company’s assistants are currently live at 750 restaurant locations, that they achieve an 85 percent order accuracy rate, and that they increase check size by 25 percent.

But ConverseNow is a much bigger play than simply automating the drive-thru. The company is developing a suite of tools to automate order-taking in many different restaurant scenarios. Shukla said he sees ConverseNow as like a Twilio for restaurants, providing one artificially intelligent glue that can power ordering via drive-thru, mobile app, phone, kiosk, etc.

Shukla told me that while ConverseNow can save on labor costs for a restaurant, it’s also being developed with the restaurant operator in mind. “Nobody is talking about the operator experience,” Shukla said, “[Customers] get frustrated, which is causing a lot of attrition. The experience for the operator at the store is not great.”

We have steadily been seeing more adoption of AI at QSRs over the past couple of years, especially in the drive-thru. A company called 5Thru is connecting license plates with customer profiles to provide order history as well as upsell recommendations (KFC was at one point considering adopting this type of service). Valyant AI is another startup that has implemented voice-based ordering for QSRs. More recently, last month McDonald’s said it was testing AI-based drive-thrus based on Apprente (which McDonald’s acquired in 2019) at 10 Chicago locations.

Shukla said it will use the new funding to further develop and scale up its products.

Small Robot Co. Raises Another £2M Through Equity Crowdfunding

Agtech startup Small Robot Company announced today that it has launched an equity crowdfunding campaign and already hit its goal of raising £2 million (~$2.77M USD). This is the fourth time Small Robot has turned to equity crowdfunding, where it has previously raised £4.3 million. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Small Robot to £9 million.

Small Robot Company uses a combination of robots and artificial intelligence to help automate certain agricultural needs. Small Robot’s products include the Tom, Dick and Harry robots. As we’ve covered previously:

  • Tom uses cameras and computer vision to precisely map a field of its plants and weeds
  • Wilma is the AI that analyzes those images to gather per-plant intelligence and weed identification
  • Dick is an autonomous weed zapper that is armed with an electric wand and information from Wilma to precisely electrocute individual weed without the need for chemicals
  • The company will eventually add a third robot, Harry, to its lineup that will do no-till drilling.

Equity crowdfunding has been a popular choice for robotics companies looking to raise money. Fellow agtech startup Future Acres, which makes a robotic platform that will initially be used to haul crops, launched its own crowdfunding campaign earlier this year. Other non-agtech robot startups equity crowdfunding include Piestro, Kiwibot, DaVinci Kitchen, Blendid and EBar.

Some of the benefits of equity crowdfunding include being able to raise money without the scaling pressures that come with traditional VC money, as well as building a diverse, enthusiastic community that can provide real world feedback and evangelize a product and campaign. For more, check out the video from a panel we devoted to equity crowdfunding at our recent ArticulATE food robotics conference in May (Spoon Plus subscription required).

UPDATE: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated Small Robot raised this funding through a private campaign plus a match with the U.K. Government. That particular money came through earlier financing. We regret the error.

Spinn Extracts $20M from Investors for its Connected Coffee Machine and Marketplace

Spinn, the makers of the connected coffee machine that uses centrifugal force when making a morning cup of joe, has raised $20 million in new funding. TechCrunch was first to report the news this morning, writing that the new round was led by Spark Capital with participation from Amazon’s Alexa Fund, Bar 9 Ventures and other existing investors. This brings the total amount raised by Spinn to $37 million.

The Spinn is perhaps best known for its looooooong journey to market. Spoon Founder Mike Wolf pre-ordered a Spinn back in 2016, and after years of delays, Mike finally got his machine in July of last year. Based on the Spinn website, new machines can be pre-ordered for delivery this Fall, and cost between $479 and $779, depending the accessories included.

The hook with Spinn is that it uses centrifugal force to, well, spin the coffee grounds for extraction rather than pressing. The machine spins the grounds more slowly for regular coffee, and higher for espessso-based drinks. The result, according to the company, is a more nuanced and flavorful cup of coffee.

In addition to its hardware, Spinn also has an online marketplace selling more than 700 different types of whole beans. During an interview at our Food Tech Live event in 2020, Spinn CEO Roderick de Rode told us that when users order coffee from Spinn, they can scan the bag with their phone and precise extraction instructions are sent to the machine.

We actually haven’t seen a ton of coffee-related news so far this year. The similar superautomatic Terra Kaffe coffee machine raised $4 million in November of last year. And Trade raised $9 million for its online coffee marketplace last September.

De Rode told TechCrunch that his company will use the new funding to further develop its brewing technology and scale up production to fulfill outstanding orders for the machine.

Bezos-Backed NotCo Raises $235M for Plant-Based Alternatives

NotCo, a Chile-based food tech company that produces various plant-based alternative foods, announced today that it has raised $235 million in its Series D round of funding.

The round was led by Tiger Global and saw participation from DFJ Growth Fund and ZOMA Lab, with individuals also joining including Jack Dorsey, Joe Gebbia, Lewis Hamilton, Roger Federer, and DJ Questlove. Existing investors include Bezos Expeditions, EHI, Future Positive, L Catterton, and Kaszek Ventures. This brings the company’s total funding to $360 million.

This new capital will allow NotCo to expand into new product categories in North America and scale its proprietary A.I. platform. Additionally, the funds will help the company accelerate its plans to launch in Europe and Asia. Currently, NotCo offers five products: NotMilk, NotBurger, NotIceCream, and NotMayo. The products are available in approximately 6,000 retailers and foodservice locations throughout the U.S., Chile, Brazil, and Argentina.

Something that sets NotCo apart from other plant-based companies is its use of its A.I. technology (the company has five patents in the U.S. for this). Called Giuseppe, the proprietary A.I. platform analyzes the properties of thousands of plants in a database and then creates unique combinations with the goal of replicating animal ingredients. For example, the ingredients in the NotMilk product include pea protein, pineapple juice, chicory root, coconut oil, and cabbage juice.

NotCo joins the ranks with other large players in the plant-based space that have successfully expanded internationally. Beyond Meat fortified its presence in Europe earlier this year, and around the same time announced that it had opened a manufacturing facility in China. Impossible Foods and Just Eat made major expansions to Asia in the fall of 2020. Oatly is currently building or planning future production facilities in Singapore, China, and the UK.

In the U.S., NotCo’s NotMilk is currently available in Sprouts, Whole Foods, Wegmans, and other retailers. All of the company’s products are available in Chile, Brazil, and Argentina. By the end of 2021, NotCo aims to have its products available in 8,000 retailers globally.