Tag: Investor Insight

Why we invested in SIMULATE

July 30, 2020

Mail order, frozen, plant-based chicken nuggets… Before we met Ben Pasternak, the founder of SIMULATE (formerly NUGGS), this would have sounded like the worst idea ever.

AgFunder Digitalk: What’s in store for agrifood investing in the wake of Covid-19?

April 23, 2020

In an effort to try and navigate how our growing but still relatively small asset class gets through the Covid-19 crisis, we’ve launched a series of digital talks for our community. In the first, we chatted with Climate Corp’s Dave Friedberg and Alexandria’s Blake Stevens.

EXCLUSIVE: Fulcrum Global Capital closes $36m agrifoodtech fund and four investments

March 12, 2020

Fulcrum raised the fund from a pool of high net worth investors to support early-stage upstream agriculture technologies in animal health, precision agriculture, food safety, and supply chain logistics

Syngenta leads Series A for WeedOUT to commercialize first species-specific biological herbicide

March 5, 2020

Syngenta Ventures’ Michael Lee tells AFN how the firm is viewing the biologics space and why WeedOUT’s species-specific approach is so important.

How Culture Biosciences is helping biomanufacture agrifood, pharma products from microbes at scale

March 4, 2020

Biomanufacturing is the term used to describe the process of using biological systems as opposed to chemistry to produce commercial biomaterials. Crudely this means using certain microbes — naturally-occurring species or genetically designed — to produce certain materials.

2020 predictions from agri-foodtech’s leading VCs

January 2, 2020

What a decade it’s been for the advancement of the food and agriculture industries! It was a decade spent catching up with other industries in the technological revolution. What’s in store for 2020? Five of the industry’s leading investors tell AFN.

Meet AgFunder’s venture partner Tom Shields

December 26, 2019

Tom Shields is a venture partner at AgFunder and works with the deal team on sourcing and leading investments. A serial entrepreneur, he has co-founded two highly successful companies, NetGravity (IPO 1998) and Yieldex (acquired by AppNexus/AT&T in 2015).

It’s time for investors to embrace nutritious foods

December 18, 2019

Most ag investment flows to high-income countries, and currently very little reaches the food systems of low-income regions like Africa, with virtually none going to support highly nutritious foods, according to GAIN.

Connecterra moves on from FitBit for cows to predictive intelligence, regenerative ag

November 28, 2019

Consumers and retailers are putting increasing demands on the world’s dairy farmers- not just to provide more supply but to do it with improved environmental credentials, better traceability, lower use of antibiotics and medicine, and more humane treatment of animals.

Food & agtech investors are most excited about the future in Asia

November 19, 2019

With Idea2Scale, we conducted a survey of 50 global venture capital firms that invest in foodtech and agtech and asked them about the categories and geographies they were most excited about as well as the key challenges to investing in the sector.

Paine Schwartz is eyeing plant-based revolution with new $1.5bn PE fund

November 6, 2019

Institutional investors are increasingly looking to invest in important sectors that matter and food and agriculture is one of them, according to Kevin Schwartz.

Survey: Which Food & AgTech categories, geographies are investors most excited about?

November 5, 2019

Find out which regions and sectors VCs are most eager to explore in 2020 and tips on how startups can improve their chances of making a deal in this new investor sentiment survey conducted by Idea2Scale and AgFunder.

Renewal Funds eyes earth-friendly food for its C$145m fourth fund

September 30, 2019

The Vancouver-based venture capital firm has raised a further C$145 million to invest in environmental tech and sustainable consumer products, including organic food and alternative protein.

Bellwether Coffee checks sustainability, fair wage boxes for impact fund DBL

September 12, 2019

“Bellwether Coffee has a dream team of sustainability and coffee experts and is addressing a large market ripe for improvement,” Nancy Pfund, managing partner at DBL Partners, tells AFN.

Why Fieldin stood out in crowded farm management software space

September 5, 2019

You’d be forgiven for finding the growing farm management software space overwhelming; there are now hundreds of different software tools for farmers across crop types globally. At AgFunder, we’ve reviewed many of them so it takes something special to capture our attention.