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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Funding

Equinom Raises $20M Series C Round for Seed Breeding Tech

Israel-based Equinom announced today it has raised a $20 million Series C funding round led by Phoenix. The round also included participation from Fortissimo, Trendlines, Maverick, and BASF, and brings Equinom’s total funding to $27.6 million.

Equinom uses AI to improve upon the existing nutrition of seeds, including a seed’s protein content. Through its natural non-GMO breeding process, seeds with desired traits are selected and then bred. Equinom’s “Product Profiler” app allows food companies to select what traits they want in a particular seed for the product they are developing. According to its website, the company is working with soy, yellow, pea, sesame, and will offer boosted versions of chickpeas, mung beans, quinoa, cowpeas, and fava beans in the future. Across the world, Equinom is growing over 100,000 acres of these crops.

With this most recent round of capital, Equinom will expand its operations in marketing, research, development, and sales. At the beginning of May, the company partnered with Dipasa, a leading producer of sesame seeds, to launch a new variety of high protein sesame seeds. In addition to Dispasa, Equinom has had contracts with major food companies like Sabra and Roquette to improve upon the nutrition content of seed for use in plant-based foods.

Seeds, nuts, and grains are more sustainable and efficient to produce than meat, yet a common complaint regarding plant-based ingredients is that they often do not have the same high protein content as meat. It’s therefore a pressing issue to find nutrient-dense crops that can support a population that will reach 9.7 billion by 2050. Plant-based ingredients like chickpea, soy, peas, and lentils are nutrient-dense and contain a high protein content, but still fall short of the protein content found in a serving of, say, beef. By increasing protein content in these seeds, Equinom’s technology could prove valuable in helping feed more mouths with more nutritious and environmentally friendly food.

In the last quarter of 2021, Equinom is set to launch the highest pea protein concentrate available on the market, called “Smarter Pea Protein.”

Babylon Micro-Farms Gets $1M Grant to Further Develop Its Software for Controlled Ag

Babylon Micro-Farms, which operates a network of indoor grow systems in foodservice venues around the U.S., has received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, with the potential for $750,000 more in follow-on funding. The grant money will go towards further development of BabylonIQ, the company’s platform that remotely manages its distributed network of farms. 

This grant follows a 2019 Phase 1 grant of $225,000, also from the National Science Foundation, that enabled the company to start trials of its technology designed to capture growth and health metrics for plants. 

Babylon Micro-Farms started in 2016, originally in Charlottesville as a project at the University of Virginia. Over the last five years, the farm itself has gone from a tabletop model to the 15-square-foot controlled-environment farming module that’s now in numerous hospitals, cafeterias, and senior living residences. The goal is to be able to remotely manage this distributed network of farms, collecting the kind of data that can inform better growing conditions for all Babylon farms. 

BabylonIQ uses machine learning and computer vision components to capture data from the farms that can optimize both plants’ grow recipes (light levels, temperature, etc.) and best practices across the Babylon Micro-Farms network. The company says the platform will eventually be able to learn from itself and improve processes over time, which in turn would hopefully lead to better-tasting greens, higher yields, and a higher nutritional profile per plant.

The emphasis on improving the software that powers farms is in keeping with something Babylon Micro-Farms CEO, Alexander Olesen, told The Spoon in 2020: that the company isn’t “necessarily interested in the hardware aspect going forward.” One potential direction the company could pursue is that of focusing primarily on software and bringing that expertise to a partnership with a separate hardware company. Nothing more has been officially said about that, though today’s news seems to point along that path. 

Meanwhile, a central “brain” for a network of smaller, module farms is still somewhat unique among controlled environment agriculture companies. Larger operations like Bowery or Plenty or even Square Roots have made much of their software systems that can remotely manage a network of farms. Babylon Micro-Farms is one of the first to do so for smaller-size farms found in cafeterias, hospitals, and other facilities that serve food. Farm.One is another such company.

Babylon Micro-Farms says this week’s Phase 2 grant also provides “financial resources to accelerate commercialization.”

InnerPlant Raises $5.65M to Turn Plants Into “Living Sensors” and Mitigate Crop Loss

Agtech company InnerPlant, which is changing plant DNA to create “living sensors” that mitigate crop loss, has raised $5.65 million in pre-seed and seed funding, according to an official announcement sent to The Spoon. The round was led by MS&AD Ventures, the investment arm of Japan’s MS&AD Insurance Group. Bee Partners, Up West, and TAU Ventures also participated in the round. 

InnerPlant created its technology platform to spot threats to plant growth — pests, nutrient deficiencies, water stress, etc. — quicker than is possible via traditional farming methods. To do that, the company recodes plant DNA to include a fluorescent safe-for-human-consumption protein that lights up the leaves of a plant when there is a problem. Essentially, it is turning the entire plant into a living signal that can “talk” to the farmer when there is a problem. Different colored lights indicate different issues.  

Since these signals are invisible to the human eye, farmers can use InnerPlant’s augmented reality system to photograph their fields and view potential problems via an iPhone or iPad. The signals can also be detected via a drone flying overhead or even a satellite.

This handy explainer video goes into more detail:

According to the company, it only takes tens of these sensor plants to protect an entire field. Once the signal plants send off a distress signal, a farmer can address the impacted area before it spreads to the whole crop. For example, if a harmful fungi breaks out in one area of a field, a farmer can get rid of only the impacted plants, instead of spraying the whole field with fungicide. Think of it as on-demand crop protection.  

InnerPlant says its entire concept is merely piggy-backing off the natural signals plants send to one another when they are in distress. Recoding the DNA to include the protein is “amplifying” these natural signals, so that farmers can spot problems faster. It also frees them from what InnerPlant founder and CEO Shely Aronov calls “the pesticide treadmill,” which is our increasing use of chemicals and pesticides that harm waterways, impact microbial diversity in soil, and are linked to some cancers.

It remains to be seen how consumers will feel about eating produce with recoded DNA, or how that message will get effectively communicated. And since InnerPlant is a relatively new company (it released its first product, the InnerTomato, in 2020), it is too soon to have much data on how effective these living plant sensors are compared to other modes of crop protection. 

The technology does, however, show us yet-another possibility for improving crop yields and mitigating loss in the food system at a time when the world’s population is growing. 

InnerPlant says it is currently working on a new product, InnerSoy. Funds from the seed and pre-seed rounds will go towards developing other products in future. 

RIND Raises $6.1M for Upcycled Fruit Snacks

RIND Snacks, a startup that produces upcycled dried fruit snacks, this week announced that it has raised $6.1 million in a Series A round of funding (news from Forbes). This round was led by Valor Siren Ventures, with participation from an existing investor, Melitas Ventures. This brings the company’s total funding to $8.4 million. This most recent round of funding will be used to increase production capacity and expand RIND’s team.

RIND’s chewy dried fruit snacks are made from fruit that would have otherwise be wasted and wind up in the landfill. The peels of the fruits are left on, which are also typically discarded. The company estimates that it has prevented about 120,000 pounds of edible fruit peels from being discarded in 2020. Later this year, RIND will also be launching crunchy dried fruit chips and the company has also hinted at making roasted vegetable snacks (including the peel) in the future.

Towards the end of 2020, Whole Foods made predictions for food trends of 2021, and one of the trends happened to be upcycled foods. A few other companies make use of discarded fruit to create new products, including the Ugly Company and 2050 Company. In April, the “Upcycled Certified” label was officially launched by the Upcycled Food Association to help consumers pick out products from companies like these that are focused on reducing food waste.

RIND’s snacks are available for purchase on the company’s website, and in over 3,000 retail locations throughout the U.S., including Whole Foods, Wegmans, Meijers, and CVS. The company has also partnered with food delivery services like HungryRoot and Imperfect Foods.

Horizon Europe Allocates €32M for Sustainable Protein Research

Horizon Europe, a European Union funding program for research and innovation, announced today that it has €32 million in funding available for research into more sustainable protein options such as cultivated meat and plant-based alternatives. The program works to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and this is the largest funding package set aside specifically for sustainable proteins to date.

There are three project categories supported by Horizon Europe’s funding for researchers to take on:

  1. Fill in the gaps of nutrition, safety, and allergenicity of alternative proteins, and then assessing the environmental footprints of these products. Budget – €11 million.
  2. Develop sustainable protein crop systems and value chains with the facilitation of best practices between farmers
    Budget – €9 million
  3. Focus on food environments and aim to ensure that consumers are able to make healthy and sustainable food choices when at restaurants and supermarkets. Budget – €12 million

Food security is a global issue because of a continuously expanding population and climate change. By 2050, it is estimated that 9.7 billion people will inhabit the planet, yet the resources and land available for food production on Earth are finite. To feed this many people, we would have to double the current amount of food production. According to the Good Food Institute, plant-based meat alternatives use 47-99 percent less land than conventional meat. The same report by GFI stated that 77 percent of all available agricultural land is used for animal agriculture, yet animal agriculture only supplies 17 percent of the world’s food supply. This type of inefficiency would make it challenging to achieve the food requirements needed by 2050.

The Good Food Institute Europe, along with 21 other organizations, sent a letter to the European Commission imploring them to consider allocating funding for the research and development of more sustainable proteins. This isn’t the first time governments have stepped up to provide funding for this type of research. The Spanish government granted BioTech Foods €5.2 million ($6.3 million USD) at the beginning of 2021 for the company’s cultured meat project, which consisted of investigating the health benefits of cultured meat. NovaMeat also received €250,000 (~ $307,500 USD) in funding from the Spanish government, at the beginning of the year to further develop its 3D printed meat alternatives. In the U.S., UC Davis received a $3.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to research cultivated meat last September.

The Horizon Europe program will run until 2027, and those interested in applying for grant money through Horizon Europe for these three projects can apply here.

Cashierless Checkout Startup Trigo Gets $10M Strategic Investment from REWE

Israel-based cashierless checkout startup Trigo has received a $10 million strategic investment from German supermarket chain Rewe. TechCrunch was first to report the news and also confirmed that Trigo has raised $104 million to date.

Trigo is one of the many startups looking to bring cashierless checkout to grocery retail. The company’s technology relies on cameras, computer vision and artificial intelligence installed in stores to keep track of what shoppers pick up and keep, charging them automatically upon exit.

That REWE is now an investor in Trigo is not a surprise, as last month the two companies announced a partnership to create a cashierless checkout store in Cologne, Germany. This is actually the second large European grocery chain to partner and invest in Trigo. In October of 2019, UK-based grocer Tesco made an undisclosed strategic investment in Trigo as part of their partnership. Trigo also has a partnership with Israeli grocery chain Shufersal, though there is no investment as part of that relationship.

It’s only Wednesday, and it’s already been a monster news week in the cashierless checkout space. Amazon announced it was adding its Just Walk Out technology to its new full-sized grocery store opening in Bellevue, Washington this week. This 25,000 sq. ft. space will be the largest implementation yet of Amazon’s cashierless checkout system. Elsewhere, Zippin partnered with American Express to open up a small convenience store inside the Barclays Center in New York, and AiFi partnered with Polish c-store chain Żabka to launch an autonomous NanoStore.

The cashierless checkout sector was already enjoying a strong start to the year with numerous funding announcements and retail partnerships. As grocers and convenience stores continue to explore more contactless forms of retail, we’ll see even more news as adoption of cashierless retail accelerates.

Motif FoodWorks Raises $226M to Improve the Taste of Plant-Based Proteins

Plant-based food tech company Motif FoodWorks has raised a whopping $226 million in Series B funding, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The round was co-led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, through its Teachers’ Innovation Platform, and BlackRock. Rethink Food and existing investors also participated in the round. To date, Motif has raised $345 million.

The company says its new funds will go towards three areas: research and development; scaling and commercializing its food tech; and expanding its number of people and facilities.

Through all of these areas, Motif’s underlying goal is to improve plant-based foods by developing novel food ingredients that lead to better texture, mouthfeel, and taste in products. The company does this via a mix of microbial engineering and precision fermentation.

Motif, which was spun out of bioengineering platform Ginkgo Bioworks, moved into its own facility in the Boston Seaport area last year, where it is focusing on R&D efforts. Meanwhile, just last month, the company announced it had acquired extrudable fat technology from private research firm Coasun to use in mimicking fat textures in plant-based meats. Additionally, Gingko is licensing prolamin technology from the University of Guelph. The prolamin tech will improve the texture of plant-based cheese so that it can melt, bubble, and stretch as easily as its traditional counterpart. 

This massive Series B fundraise comes at a time when retail sales of plant-based foods surpassed $7 billion. Even so, there’s room for improvement. Research from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and Earth Day Network found that 44 percent of consumers surveyed “don’t like the taste of plant-based foods.” However, two out of three said in the same research that they would be “willing to eat more plant-based foods instead of meat if plant-based foods tasted better than they do today.”

Fermentation technology, sometimes called “the third pillar” of alt protein, is a way to bridge the taste gap between traditional and plant-based meats. Ingredients made with biomass and/or precision fermentation can be combined with plant-based ingredients to achieve the kind of meat and dairy analogues that taste and feel as close to the real thing as possible.

Other companies, including Perfect Day, Change Foods, and Clara Foods are all working towards this goal, too.

Underground Cellar Raises $12.5M for its Gamified “Upgrade” Wine Service

Underground Cellar, which aims to entice wine buyers with the promise of random upgraded bottles of wine, announced today that it has raised a $12.5 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Accomplice, with participation from Golden Ventures and Bling Capital.

There are plenty of players in the online wine space such as Vivino and Winc that recommend and sell wine, but Underground Cellar’s hook is its gamification of the wine-buying process. Rather than discounting wines, it offers customers the chance for free upgrades. For example, someone might purchase three $20 bottles of wine through Underground Cellars. However, after purchase, Underground Cellar upgrades one of those bottles to a randomly selected, more expensive wine. So the customer could receive a bottle worth $50, $200 or much more.

In addition to its upgrade program, Underground Cellar also offers customers the ability to store up to 500 bottles of wine in the company’s temperature- and humidity-controlled facility in Napa Valley. This “Cloud Cellar” holds the purchased wine, and when customers are ready, they select bottles from their collection and Underground Cellar ships them off for delivery.

Underground Cellar’s funding could be coming at just the right time. Wine Spectator wrote back in December of 2020 that the U.S. wine market grew just 0.1 percent last year, with 328.9 million cases sold. However, Rob McMillan, executive vice president of Silicon Valley Bank’s wine division, told Wine-Searcher in April of this year to expect a wine boom over the next year as the pandemic recedes. Wine-heavy events like weddings, which were put on hold last year, will be back and there will be pent-up demand to celebrate.

With its new funding, Underground Cellar says that it will enhance its gamified platform, deepen relationships with wineries and triple the size of its team by the end of the year.


Dishpatch Raises £10M for ‘Finish at Home’ Meal Delivery Service

Dishpatch, a finish-at-home meal kit service based in the U.K., has raised £10 million (~$14 million USD) in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz and LocalGlobe, who co-led the round. Other participants to the round include Stride, Entree Capital, Entrepreneur First, and several angel investors.

The Dishpatch service is a cross between a meal kit company and a restaurant delivery service. The company works with local restaurants to offer consumers a pick of weekly meals that are delivered on Fridays. All food is fully cooked at the restaurant but arrives to customers’ homes cold. Customers themselves handle the final heating and preparation, aided by detailed instructions that accompany that food. 

Dishpatch, which has called itself “the antithesis of Deliveroo,” launched during the pandemic as an in-between option for off-premises restaurant meals that’s not quite restaurant delivery but not a box of raw ingredients a la HelloFresh, either.  

The finish-at-home meal kit concept as a whole became popular in 2020 during the pandemic. For many restaurants, particularly higher end ones, throwing a fully prepped hot meal into a takeout box and handing it over to a delivery courier was less than ideal. However, with dining rooms closed for the majority of 2020, businesses had to make revenue from other channels. Finish-at-home meal kits provided a way for restaurants to participate in delivery without compromising the integrity of their food concepts. Many of the restaurants now on Dishpatch’s platform started working with the company, which was founded in 2020, for exactly this reason. 

Dishpatch currently has 25 restaurant signed to its platform that delivery to the London area — over 50 miles from the city center in some cases. Funds from this seed round will allow 20 more restaurants to join the by the end of the year. The company will also further develop its tech, marketing, distribution, and customer service.  

Online Grocer Boxed Bulks up by Going Public via SPAC

Boxed, a grocery e-commerce site that specializes in selling bulk items, is going public via special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). Announced today, the deal is being done via merger with Seven Oaks Acquisition Corp., and the combined company will be valued at roughly $900 million. To date, Boxed had raised $243 .6million in funding.

Founded in 2013, Boxed is kinda like a Costco without the membership requirement, selling bulk goods to both consumers and businesses. In addition to selling stuff online, Boxed also licenses out its order fulfillment and logistics technology to other retailers. In January of this year, the company entered into a multi-year partnership with Aeon Group, one of Asia’s largest retail conglomerates. (Aeon also led Boxed’s $100 million round of funding back in 2018.)

Boxed’s decision to go public via SPAC comes at a time of drastically increased interest in grocery e-commerce. COVID drove record amounts of people into online grocery shopping last year, and while those numbers have come down as the pandemic recedes, Coresight Research data shows that more than one-third of online grocery shoppers will keep up the new habit post-pandemic. Additionally, the ship-to-home category of grocery e-commerce that Boxed is in has hovered around $2 billion from month to month over the last year, according to Brick Meets Click.

All of this increased interest in online grocery shopping also means Boxed is facing increased pressure on a number of fronts. Not only does Boxed need to compete with traditional retailers like Walmart, which is rapidly expanding its delivery options and automating its fulfillment, but there is a raft of well-funded newcomers to contend with as well. On the ship-to-home side, companies like Imperfect Foods and Misfits Market both raised sizeable rounds of funding this year to expand. And on the smaller end of the spectrum, startups like Gopuff, Fridge No More and JOKR promise grocery delivery in as little as 15 minutes.

Boxed will now have additional funding to better compete. According to today’s press announcement Boxed “is expected to receive $334 million in net cash proceeds from a combination of Seven Oaks’ cash in trust of approximately $259 million, assuming no redemptions by Seven Oaks’ public stockholders, as well as a $120 million fully committed private placement financing.” Boxed CEO Chieh Huang will remain in charge of the new entity.

Popmenu Raises $65M for its Restaurant Digital Marketing and Ordering Platform

Popmenu, a digital marketing and ordering platform for restaurants, announced today that it has raised a $65 million Series C round of funding. The round was led by Tiger Global Management with participation from new investor Salesforce Ventures and existing investors Bedrock Capital, Base10 and Felicis Ventures. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Popmenu to $87.1 million.

Popmenu’s online suite of tools allow restaurants to build their own branded websites, with dynamic, interactive menus. Restaurants can also coordinate delivery or pickup, enable customer reviews and generate follow-up digital marketing promotions. Popmenu also offers a contactless ordering software package (something made more important by the pandemic) that allows guests to scan a QR code with their smartphone to view and order off of restaurant menus.

During the pandemic last year, when dining rooms were shut down, the restaurant industry turned to delivery and takeout to stay alive. The easiest way to do that was to join up with a third-party delivery service like Uber Eats or DoorDash. But that easy path to delivery came at the cost of handing over both the customer relationship (i.e., ordering and sales data) and the ability to control branding. Some restaurant tech companies even went as far as calling the pandemic “a wakeup call” for restaurants around where, how, and by whom their data gets accessed.

As an alternative to delivery marketplaces, Popmenu bills itself as a tool restaurants can use to control the customer’s journey from the time that person lands on the person’s website to the time they click the order button and their credit card is charged.

This rebuilding of direct relationships between restaurants and consumers is something many software services tout nowadays, with everyone from Toast, Square, Olo, and other offering some form of direct ordering capability. Squarespace’s recent acquisition of hospitality management platform Tock will likely add more competition to this space, too.

At the same time, however, delivery services themselves are bringing their own “commission-free” ordering platforms to market. Grubhub, DoorDash, and Uber Eats have all announced some version of this concept in a bid to keep restaurants (and their data) firmly entrenched in their own ecosystems. 

For its part, Popmenu says it will use the new funding to accelerate the development of its Popmenu Max, which bulks up its all-in-one solution with some AI-powered features.

Virtual Restaurant Company Curb Raises €20M

Stockholm, Sweden-based ghost kitchen startup Curb announced this week it has raised a €20 million (~$24.4 million USD) round led by Point72 Ventures (h/t tech.eu). EQT, an existing investor, also participated in the round. Curb has now raised €23.2 million to date.

Curb is only a little over one year old, having been founded in May 2020 by ex-Delivery Hero employees Carl Tengberg and Felipe Gutierrez. The company raised an initial €3.2 million in December of last year, which went towards helping the company expand its delivery-only restaurant brands’ presence.

Curb operates what’s essentially a virtual food court, with many of the items meant to evoke street food. It’s collection of delivery-only restaurants include a Mexican-American concept, a burger restaurant, salads and bowls, and chicken wings, among other offerings. All concepts, menus, food preparation, design, and other branding elements are created in-house. Curb also operates its own tech stack. While specific details are not widely available publicly, the company has said it prioritizes data tracking and analysis to improve operations across its supply change as well as monitor customer demands and alter menu items accordingly. 

The company’s operation currently serves customers in Stockholm and Copenhagen, Denmark. Customers of Curb can order via a number of third-party delivery services that differ based on availability in a given location. Orders are prepped and fulfilled in ghost kitchen locations.

Taster, headquartered in London, U.K., is probably Curb’s nearest competitor in terms of what it offers. Like Curb, Taster has its own portfolio of virtual restaurants. Order prep and fulfillment is done in house, and items are available via third-party delivery platforms. The company raised $37 million at the beginning of May. In the U.S., a company called C3 offers a similar model to both Curb and Taster, with restaurant tech company Lunchbox powering the back-end technical capabilities of its virtual food hall.

Curb, meanwhile, says it will use its new funds to further develop its tech stack and grow its overall operations.