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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Funding

Halla Raises $4.5M for Its Food Recommendation Platform

Halla, the AI-powered production recommendation service for grocery retail, announced today that it has raised $4.5 million in Series A1 funding, led by Food Retail Ventures. This brings the total amount raised by Halla to $8.5 million.

Halla’s platform integrates with a grocer’s existing digital commerce solution to provide customized product recommendations and substitutions for out of stock items to consumers. But Halla’s platform doesn’t just rely on previous purchases to make its recommendations. The company says it uses more than 100 billion shopper and product data points to predict what a shopper is looking for. Halla’s product video embedded below illustrates how Halla’s the system looks at all kinds of data about a shopper as it makes a recommendation in real time.

Grocery has been the beneficiary of a ton of funding this year, with $10 billion going into the sector as of July this year. Most of of the funding and attention has been around speedy grocery delivery services, but money has been doled out to startups working up and down the grocery stack. Hungryroot, and online grocer that uses machine learning for predictive recommendations, raised $40 million last month. In April, Trax raised $640 million for its computer vision-based inventory management system, and Shelf Engine raised $41 million for its perishable inventory management platform.

A big reason for all this money flowing into grocery is the pandemic. Fears around COVID-19 sent record amounts of people into online grocery shopping last year, creating new logistical and fulfillment issues for retailers. But the pandemic also highlighted flaws in our existing grocery supply chain, as evidenced by the panic hoarding and empty shelves that happened at the beginning of the outbreak. All of this is to say there are a bunch of new issues for grocery retailers to solve post-pandemic, which means plenty of opportunities for startups.

Halla said that a “top-5 U.S. grocer” is currently running Halla in more than 1,100 e-commerce storefronts. Halla will use the new funding to double the number of stores it’s in, and double its headcount by 2022.

Rise Gardens Raises $9M in Series A Funding

Rise Gardens has raised $9 million in an oversubscribed Series A Round, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. The round was led by TELUS Ventures with participation from existing investors True Ventures and Amazon Alexa Fund and new investor Listen Ventures. It brings Rise’s total funding to date to $13 million. 

New funds will go towards product development and expansion, according to the company. As of right now, Rise Gardens makes an IoT-connected hydroponic grow system for the consumer home. The company provides the farming system, seed pods, nutrients for the water, and accompanying mobile app that users can rely on to monitor and manage plant growth. The garden comes in three sizes, plus a tabletop version that was released at the end of last year. 

As of right now, there are no voice control features on the gardens. But Rise CEO Hank Adams hinted last year at an eventual collaboration with Amazon that would bring Alexa functionality to the system. The Amazon Alexa Fund’s involvement in today’s funding round suggests that ambition is still very much in the plans. Rise will also in the near future sell its gardens via Amazon, marking the first time the product will be available via something other than the company’s direct-to-consumer channel.

Rise is one of a number of companies trying to bring the concept of high-tech gardening into consumers’ homes. Other notables right now include Gardyn, which makes a compact indoor-only unit, Lettuce Grow’s Farmstand, which can work both indoors and outdoors, and Hong Kong-based Aspara’s countertop unit.

All of these systems use hydroponics to grow leafy greens and herbs. They also all, at this point, come with a hefty price tag: Rise’s Single-Family Garden starts at $549 USD, for example, while a Lettuce Grow unit that holds 24 plants and includes LED lights costs $849.

Adams said today that part of its new funds will go towards reaching “an even wider audience in the U.S., Canada and around the world.”  

Multus Media Raises $2.2M for Cultured Meat Serum Replacement

Multus Media, a startup working on a replacement for animal serum used in cultivating meat, announced today that it has raised a £1.6 milliion (~$2.2M USD) Seed round of funding. Investors in the round include SOSV, Zero Carbon Capital, Marinya Capital and angel investor Sake Bosch. The round also includes an equity-free grant of £106,000 (~$146,000 USD) from the UK Research and Innovation Council.

Founded in 2019, Multus Media was spun out of SOSV’s IndieBio program and is developing a new type of growth medium for use in creating cultured meat that is more economical that current solutions. Serum is what cultivated animal cells are placed in, allowing them to grow and form cultured meat. Serum is also an expensive part of the cultivation process with the controversial fetal bovine serum costing $200 per liter. But it’s not just the cost of the serum itself, it’s how much is used to culture meat.

As Cai Linton, Multus Media CEO explained to me last week, part of the issue is how quickly existing serum formulations deplete. Linton said that because of this depletion, serums need to be replaced every two to three days in order to keep the meat cells growing. Multus is developing a formulation that will last twice that, saving cultured meat companies money because they don’t need to buy as much of it.

Right now, Multus has identified the formulation of proteins, compounds and other ingredients it needs to make its serum. The next phase will be producing the serum, dubbed Proliferum M. Linton said that the company is looking to bring its first product to market by the end of this year, and ramp up production by the end of 2022. Multus’ formulation is not animal free at this point, though Linton said it will be as they scale up production. By 2026, the company projects that Proliferum M will cost less than $1 per liter.

There are a number of startups working on novel replacements for animal-based growth serums. In South Korea, Seawith is using algae to create both growth serum and scaffolding in cultured meat. In Canada, Future Fields is developing an animal-free serum designed to cultivate chicken.

Bringing the cost of cultured meat into parity with animal meat is a critical part of the market gaining widespread adoption. We’ve already seen companies like Mosa Meat and Future Meat both slash the production costs of their cultured meat over the past year. Perhaps Multus Media can help them, and other players in the space, bring those costs down even further.

Verve Motion Hauls in $15M for its Exosuit, Which Ahold Delhaize Piloted

For workers who spend their days moving heavy things, the refrain “lift with your legs and not with your back,” could soon become “lift with your legs while wearing the high-tech exosuit.” Verve Motion, which makes just such an exosuit that assists people when picking up objects, has raised $15 million, TechCrunch was first to report today. This Series A round was led by Construct Capital with participation from existing investors, such as Founder Collective, Pillar VC, Safar Partners and OUP.

Verve Motion’s SafeLift suit sounds like something straight out of a Marvel movie. From the product description on the company’s website:

The technology behind SafeLift has been developed at Harvard over the past decade, and is based on the latest advances in robotics, apparel design, and movement science. The suit applies assistance in parallel with the user’s muscles and responds to their movement in milliseconds. It combines state-of-the-art motion tracking technology with powerful robotic actuators and integrates it all into a lightweight and easily wearable device that doesn’t restrict normal activities.

As The Wall Street Journal reported last month, Verve Motion’s suit was piloted by Ahold Delhaize last year to help warehouse workers who assembled goods for retail outlets and e-commerce orders. The suit doesn’t grant superhuman strength like the power loader from Aliens. Instead, it reduces strain associated with doing the literal heavy lifting at work. Verve Motion says that the SafeLift can reduce strain by 30 percent when performing strenuous tasks, resulting in fewer injuries and lower fatigue rates.

The technology is still new and as the WSJ points out, exosuits like this should be studied for any long-term impacts on workers. But should exosuits prove to be a safe and effective way for workers to move boxes of groceries around in a fulfillment center, we could see increased adoption of the technology. Online grocery sales were $7 billion in May of this year, and e-commerce is expected to a be a pandemic-borne habit that sticks with consumers going forward. As a result, grocery retailers will need ways to fulfill all those orders. Some retailers are adopting robotic fulfillment solutions a la Ocado or Takeoff, but exosuits could prove to be another great fit as well.

Wicked Kitchen, UK Plant-Based Food Brand, Raises $14M Series A Round

Wicked Kitchen, a UK-based plant-based food and prepared meal brand, announced this week that has closed a Series A round of $14M. This is the company’s first public round and it was led by Unovis Asset Management and NRF Nove Foods.

Following this funding, Wicked Kitchen will soon expand into the U.S. with its plant-based offerings, and will build out its teams in London, Austin, and Minneapolis. Its current product lines are extensive, featuring everything from vegan desserts to alternative protein analogs. For the U.S. consumer, Wicked Kitchen will bring plant-based prepared frozen meals, ready-to-eat lunch and breakfast options, sauces, mayo, pesto, and meals kits to select retailers.

The founders of Wicked Kitchen are Chad and Derek Sarno, who are also chefs and co-founders of Good Catch, a plant-based seafood brand in the U.S. In 2018, the Sarnos collaborated with Tesco in the U.K. to launch Wicked Kitchen as a new plant-based range. Wicked Kitchen products are sold exclusively in Tesco, and has yet to be announced which retailers will carry the company’s products in the U.S.

In 2020, $2.1 billion was invested into plant-based companies, and they have continued to score a lot of funding this year. Large funding rounds like Wicked Kitchen’s recent round has allowed plant-based companies to expand into additional markets throughout the world. Singapore-based Next Gen Foods announced yesterday that it will be bringing its plant-based chicken brand TiNDLE to the U.S. following a $20 million extension of its seed round. Cultivated meat producer Aleph Farms raised $105 million earlier this month and shared it will use this funding to grow its operations internationally. Eat Just also shared that it plans to use its $200 million funding round that was closed this past March to expanding internationally.

Wicked Kitchen’s products are expected to roll out by the end of summer in the U.S., with a total of 20 products launching initially.

FreshRealm Raises $32M for Fresh, Prepared Meals

FreshRealm, a prepared fresh meals company based in Ventura, California, announced this week that it has raised $32 million. The institutional investors were not disclosed, and this brings the company’s total funding to $46.6 million.

This most recent round of funding will be used to expand FreshRealm’s production facilities, with the goal of opening additional facilities throughout the country for increased distribution. The company plans to focus on product innovation and developing proprietary ingredients for its meals. FreshRealm has plans to accelerate its growth strategy for its upcoming nationwide rollout in grocery retailers.

FreshRealm claims to be the only fresh meal company with a nationwide reach. Its prepared meals are not frozen, and the company applies “just-in-time” logistics to ensure all ingredients are fresh. The capital will also be used to develop different products, including ready-to-heat meals, ready-to-cook meals, and meal kit offerings.

Quite a few direct-to-consumer prepared meal companies already exist, including Freshly, Daily Harvest, HungryRoot. Companies like Blue Apron and HelloFresh ship meal kit boxes filled with various ingredients to the consumer with directions on how to assemble the meal at home. Sunbasket and Purple Carrot are now a hybrid service offering both prepared meals and meal kits. FreshRealm is taking a slightly different approach by offering fresh, not frozen, prepared meals that will be offered in grocery stores and retailers rather than shipped directly to the consumer’s home.

FreshRealm has not announced which exact retailers it will partner with but did say its meals are currently available in a few select retailers. The company has plans for a national rollout in Fall 2021.

Next Gen Foods Raises $20M, Will Bring its Plant-Based Chicken in the U.S.

Next Gen Foods, which makes a plant-based chicken brand TiNDLE, announced yesterday that it has raised a $20 million extension of its seed round. This extension includes new investors such as Global Fund GGV Capital, Bits x Bites, Yeo Hiap Seng, as well as existing investors Temasek and K3 Ventures. This latest round follows Next Gen’s $10 million raise in March of this year and brings the company’s total amount of funding to $30 million.

Singapore-based Next Gen Foods first launched its TiNDLE brand through restaurants in the spring of this year. TiNDLE is made from soy protein, wheat gluten, wheat starch, and sunflower and coconut oils, and contains 17 grams of protein per serving. The company says TiNDLE is now sold in more than 70 restaurants in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Macau.

With its new money, Next Gen says it will expand into the U.S. market and hire more than 50 employees that will primarily be based in the San Francisco Bay Area. At the same time, Next Gen will continue its expansion across the APAC and Middle East, and establish a research and development center in Singapore.

Next Gen Foods is entering the U.S. market at a time when there are more plant-based chicken options than ever. Other startups making forays into the plant-based chicken space include SIMULATE, Rebellyous, Daring, and Nowadays. Not to mention Beyond Meat, the publicly traded plant-based giant, which just launched its own plant-based chicken tenders for restaurants this week.

That so many companies are vying to create a plant-based chicken alternative isn’t surprising given that chicken is the most consumed meat in the U.S., Next Gen’s product could help it stand out in that competitive field however, because its chicken isn’t a nugget or a tender. It’s more of a meat analog that the company says can be prepared using a number of different techniques (grilling, frying, etc.) across a range of cuisines.

Comet Bio Raises $22M Series C for its Upcycled Ingredients

Comet Bio, which manufactures various ingredients through upcycling, announced today that it has completed its Series C with an initial close of $22 million. The round was led by Open Prairie, the Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC), BDC Capital, as well as existing investor Sofinnova Partners.

With headquarters in London, Ontario and Schaumberg, Illinois Comet Bio takes agricultural leftovers from farms and upcycles them through a proprietary process to turn them into a number of different ingredient products including a prebiotic dietary fiber called Arrabina, sugar syrup alternatives called Sweeterra, as well as animal and bionutrition industrial products.

Upcycling is a trend we follow closely here at The Spoon, and it’s one that thankfully seems to be catching on with a number of startups. ReGrained upcycles grain from beer brewing into bread and even ice cream. Kern Tec upcycles stone fruit pits into oils and and alternative dairy products. And Rind produces upcycled dried fruit snacks.

In fact, there’s been so much momentum going into upcycled foods that the field now has its own certification label. As my colleague, Mike Wolf wrote recently:

The interest in upcycled food is also a part of a broader interest in companies up and down the food system in tackling the problem of food waste. The pandemic helped accelerate this interest as everyone saw entire crops go to waste, but the reality is rising costs of food products has made reducing food waste not only appealing to sustainability-oriented organizations, but also to the bottom-line focused types in big corporates at CPG, retail and restaurants.

In the press announcement, Comet Bio said it will use the new funds to invest in its product innovation and health claims development.

 

Shopic Raises $10M for its Clip-On Smart Cart Cashierless Checkout Solution

Smart shopping cart startup Shopic announced today that it has raised $10 million in equity funding. The round was led by Claridge Israel, with participation from existing investors Entrée Capital, IBI Tech Fund, and Tal Capital. This brings the total amount raised by Shopic to $21 million.

The Tel Aviv, Israel-based Shopic creates cashierless checkout retail experiences through its a device that clips on to the handles of existing shopping carts. The Shopic device has cameras and a touchscreen, and uses computer vision to recognize products placed inside the cart. The Shopic system keeps tally of everything in the cart and ties in with a store’s POS so customers can skip the checkout line and get charged automatically upon leaving.

Shopic also promotes its smart carts as advertising vehicles and real-time inventory management systems. In addition to presenting an ongoing receipt as people shop, the touchscreen can also display customized digital promotions and ads based on data such as a customer’s shopping history. Because Shopic’s system is keeping track of what items are placed in the cart (and taken out) and when, it also provides real-time inventory insight as well as information about how customers shop.

The cashierless checkout space has seen a ton of funding and installation activity around the world so far this year. There are a number of solutions coming to market including retrofitting stores with cameras (Trigo, Grabango) and smart shopping carts (Caper, Veeve). Even Shopic’s very specific sub-section of turning existing shopping carts into smart carts is getting crowded, with other players such as SAI, WalkOut and Nomitri vying for grocery retailer dollars as well.

All of this action illustrates how adoption of cashierless checkout is certainly accelerating, thanks in part to its contactless nature and fears stirred by the pandemic. But despite all the funding and the momentum, it will still be awhile before it crosses over into the mainstream. I recently spoke with the CEOs of cashierless checkout startups Trigo and AiFi. The Trigo CEO believes we’ll see cahierless checkout options in every major city of the world as early as next year. That could mean there’s just one store offering it, however. AiFi’s CEO said we’re about a decade away from cashierless checkout becoming mainstream.

In its press announcement today, Shopic said that it is already deploying solutions with major grocery chains around the world, and will use its new funding to accelerate commercial activities and expand its team.

86 Repairs Nabs $7.3M in Funding for Restaurant Maintenance Tech

Restaurant tech company 86 Repairs has raised an additional $5.3 million, bringing its total funding for its seed round to $7.3 million, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Investors in this latest raise include TDF Ventures, Gordon Food Service, MATH Venture Partners, Revolution, and Cleveland Avenue. To date, 86 Repairs has raised $8.8 million.

Chicago-based 86 Repairs says the new funds will help the company build out more products for its maintenance and repairs management platform for restaurants.

The 86 Repairs system manages repair and maintenance processes for restaurants by digitizing information about all a restaurant’s equipment, and then handling the bulk of the work when there is an issue. For example, if a walk-in cooler breaks down, the restaurant calls or texts 86 Repairs, who handles things like troubleshooting, warranty checks, and setting up an appointment with a preferred technician. The company says it takes care of all communication, scheduling, and dispatching with a restaurant’s preferred equipment vendors.

The 86 Repairs platform also includes a “data insights” portion that displays things like incident history and overall spend on maintenance repair. The idea is to give restaurants one central location at which to view all data about all maintenance, even for large, multi-unit chains. To that end, a number of different chains already use the platform, including McDonald’s, Jimmy John’s, Sonic, and Famous Dave’s.

As predicted, both interest and investment in restaurant back-of-house technologies has increased since the start of the year. Though U.S. restaurants are for the most part reopened at full capacity, the need for cost-cutting and cost-saving measures is more important than ever.

ResQ, which just raised $7.5 million, is the other notable restaurant tech right now focused on repairs and maintenance.

Software that can digitize the maintenance management process makes sense for larger chains like McDonald’s. For smaller, independent restaurants — the benefits may be a bigger question mark. Spending money on another software subscription may or may not be justifiable, depending on how much a restaurant is able to save in overall maintenance and repair costs.

South Korea: Online Grocer Kurly Raises $200M Series F

Kurly, the South Korean startup behind online grocery service Market Kurly, announced today that it has raised a $200 million Series F round of funding. The Korea JoongAng Daily reports that this latest round was led by existing investors such as Aspex Management, DST Global, Sequoia Capital China, along with new investors like Millennium Management and CJ Logistics. This brings the total amount of money raised by Kurly to $428 million and gives the company a $2.2 billion valuation.

At the same time, Kurly also said that it would no longer seek to go public on U.S. stock exchanges and will instead IPO on a Korean stock exchange. For more on that, The Korea Economic Daily has some good background and context as to why Kurly may have made its stock market switch.

Here at The Spoon, we are more interested in the food tech angle, and Kurly is just the latest example of an online grocery startup raising big money. According to PitchBook data released last week, investors have poured more than $10 billion into grocery startups in 2021. Kurly’s $200M Series F is downright quaint compared to the $3 billion raised by Xingsheng Youxuan, or the $1.5 billion raised by Gopuff, or the $850 million raised by Getir.

Kurly’s business is also a little more traditional than many of the grocery startups raising money right now. Unlike Gopuff and Getir and the raft of smaller companies promising grocery delivery in just 10 minutes, Kurly offers its customers next-day delivery. What it lacks in speed however, it more than makes up for in size as it provides its service across South Korea.

The pandemic has driven a good deal of interest and investment in the online grocery sector. Fears of COVID-19 drove people into online grocery last year. And while online grocery sales have come down (at least in the U.S.) as vaccinations have rolled out, there is some market research showing this new e-grocery behavior will stick with consumers. Now we’ll have to see what post-pandemic reactions to online grocery are around the globe (and if it was worth all the investment).

P&P Optica Raises Fresh Funding for Hyperspectral Food Safety Inspection Tech

Canada’s P&P Optica (PPO) has raised an undisclosed amount of Series B funding for its food safety inspection technology, which uses hyperspectral imaging to gather quality metrics on the food inside of processing plants. 

The round was led by Ag Capital Canada, with new investor Synovus Family Office as well as existing investors Fulcrum Global Capital, Export Development Canada (EDC) and others.

Waterloo, Ontariro-based PPO says it will use the new funds to implement its system across more food processing plants in Canada and the U.S. The PPO Smart Imaging System uses hyperspectral imaging to “see” inside of foods like produce and meats. In doing so, the system is able to gather more precise information on overall food quality. For example, PPO’s tech can determine the fat-to-lean ratio for bacon and sausage, measure the tenderness of a steak, and even detect foreign matter like rubber, cardboard, or plastic. Wood, bone, and even certain types of metals can also be found in food items, and often not detectable by traditional x-ray machines.

While PPO’s physical imaging system itself is meant to be used inside the food processing plant, users can access data on food remotely, from a cloud-based dashboard. The company says that thanks to an AI element, the system can learn over time from what it sees and in doing so detect contaminants faster. 

ImpactVision is the other notable company with a hyperspectral imaging system for food producers. The company was recently acquired by Apeel, and its tech will be used to assess shelf life and quality of produce items. PPO’s system, on the other hand, is at this point more for meat products.

Being able to see inside food could potentially help companies catch safety issues before food leaves the plant, saving them from performing recalls and wasting food and money.

PPO says the new funding will be also go towards expanding the company’s analytics software, including the aforementioned AI tool.