We are excited to announce a closing of our first fund at €42M, exceeding the €40M target size! We launched the fund in April 2020 as the first early-stage VC fund in the Nordics fully focused on investing in foodtech startups.
A huge thank you goes to all our investors, who have shown tremendous trust in us creating something new. A quarter of the capital in the fund comes from investors closely linked to the Nordic food ecosystem, such as Valio (Valion Pension Fund), Heino Group, HKScan and Atria´s producer-owner cooperatives Lihakunta and Itikka co-operative. The anchor investor for the fund is government-owned Business Finland VC, for which the €20M investment is the largest commitment to a single VC fund this far.
We are investing the funds in early-stage companies based in the Nordic and Baltic countries and leveraging rapidly developing technologies to radically renew the food system – from the soil to the orbit and from new sources of protein to better ways of eating.
Nordics is the home of Oatly, Mathem, Mycorena, Wolt, Solar Foods and Simple Feast among many others, and is emerging as a key hub for foodtech in Europe. The startups in the region raised a record €425M funding in 2020 (reported by DigitalFoodLab).
Top-tier scientific research has always had strong support from the Nordic societies. There is a lot of untapped technology and expertise in store, not only in food and agtech, but also in fields adjacent to food, such as biotechnology, engineering, and mobile technologies. It also helps that the population in the Nordic is very health conscious and sustainability focused.
There is unprecedented pressure to transform the food system into a more nourishing and sustainable one. It is especially the new science-based companies that have a massive opportunity to change the way we produce, distribute, consume, and discard of food. We are here to help on the first steps in putting technology to impactful use.
This far we have invested a total of approximately €4M in six startups.
eniferBio (Finland) and Hailia Nordic (Finland) both develop sustainable protein sources. EniferBio ferments side streams from the bioethanol industry into Pekilo mycoprotein and Hailia Nordic turns underutilized small fish into healthy and easy to use food products.
Three of the companies accelerate the development of next generation plant-based foods. Nordic Umami Company (Finland) creates ingredients with umami taste from Nordic peas and beans, Chromologics (Denmark) produces a sustainable food colorants through fermentation technology and Melt & Marble (Sweden) makes beef-like fat using microbes instead of animals.
Kuva Space (Finland) builds nanosatellites equipped with hyperspectral cameras to provide actionable green data for example for precision agriculture and validation of carbon sequestration.
In the coming years we will make 15 to 20 new investments in the Nordics and Baltics.
