EIT Food fund invests in three high-performing agrifood startups
EIT Food is providing direct funding of up to €500,000 per venture to three new investments in high performing agrifood startups as part of the EIT Food Startup Impact Fund.
EIT Food is supported by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union.
The funding opportunity is open to all EU agrifood startups that are alumni or currently participating in one of EIT Food’s flagship entrepreneurship programmes: Seedbed Incubator, EIT Food Accelerator Network or RisingFoodStars.
The three startups EIT Food will invest in are:
- Fyteko (Belgium) – developing next generation bio crop inputs (bio-stimulants, bio-herbicides and bio-fungicides). These low cost, effective products are environmentally sustainable, and can be used to enhance and replace traditional agri-chem crops.
- MaGie Creations (The Netherlands) – taking spent brewers grains waste from breweries and upcycling it into high value food ingredients for high protein bakery products and fat replacement. Its circular economy model reduces food waste, as well as improving the nutritional profile of baked goods such as pastries and cookies.
- ConstellR (Germany) – a space data and services company leading the way in delivering daily, global land surface temperature maps for agtech, ConstellR provides the fundamental global data for smart crop monitoring, identifying changes in crop health days to weeks before they become visible and enabling farmers to react to and mitigate potential yield risks earlier than ever before.
Madeleine Gielens, founder of MaGie Creations, said partnering with EIT Food accelerates the speed with which his startup can bring its beer-grain-based food ingredients to market.
“It allows us to take the next steps in research and development, factory design and commercialisation, speeding up the market adoption of upcycled foods,” Gielens said.
Benedicte O’Sullivan, COO of Fyteko, said Fyteko is “honoured” to receive the support of EIT food, adding: “As an EIT Food community member we are very much looking forward to receiving support in scaling our operations, connecting with industry partners or further investment opportunities.”
Max Gulde, CEO of ConstellR, said: “With our vision fixed firmly on future food security and agrifood system optimisation via ‘beyond-visual’ data, this partnership with EIT Food helps bring our critical data infrastructure and crop monitoring products and services ever closer to the market and to leveraging global impact. The stellar network of EIT Food and its investment helps us grow our product and agronomy teams and bring precise, granular and actionable crop health insights to the hands of growers across the planet.”
Benoit Buntinx, director of Business Creation at EIT Food, said the EIT Food’s Startup Impact Fund acts as a “bridge” for high-performing agrifood startups to “transition from a regional to a European and global investment scope, increasing their visibility to attract interest from other investors”.
He added: “We are grateful to our wider investor community, including our core partner FoodSparks (by PeakBridge), which plays a vital role in opening up further investment opportunities for these companies. EIT Food continues to search for high-impact startups with an outstanding definition of their value proposition and proprietary technologies that can increase the sustainability, health and integrity of our food value chain.”
