New in Funding

• 🛵 Indian food delivery startup Zomato has raised a further $250M, just two months after closing a $660M series J financing round, and is now valued at $5.4B ahead of its IPO later this year.
  

• 🧫 Dutch cultivated meat startup Mosa Meat announced the third and final closing of its series B funding round at €69.6M, and plans to extend its current pilot production facility, develop an industrial-sized production line and commercialise its product for consumers.

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• ☕️ Foxtrot Market closed $42M series B funding to double the store count of its corner store and café concept, which provides app-based purchasing and offers one-hour delivery of its entire inventory.
  

• 🍗 Singapore startup Next Gen has closed a $10M seed funding round, the largest plant-based startup seed financing round to date, for its plant-based chicken products. It plans to put the funding towards the consumer launch of its chicken brand, as well as further R&D to expand its product portfolio. 

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• 🧫 South Korean cell-based startup CellMEAT closed a $4.5M pre-series A funding round, to further develop and scale up its cultivated meat technology, with a view to “making cultured meat a reality in South Korea”. 
  

• 🚜 Future Acres launched a $3M equity crowdfunding campaign for its robotic platform for farms, which autonomously transports up to 500lbs of crops around a farm, navigating all types of terrain and inclement weather.

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• 🐛 British biotech Better Origin raised €2.5M to scale up its product, the X1, which is one of the world’s first insect mini-farms which converts food waste into sustainable animal feed in the form of insect larvae, as a replacement for conventional soy-based animal feed.
  

• 🧪 Canadian cell-based food tech Future Fields secured $2.2M seed funding, to further development of its cellular growth medium which should enable its customers to produce lab-grown meat at a lower cost.
  

• 🧬 Project Well closed $2M in seed financing for its food-as-medicine marketplace, designed to help those suffering from diet-sensitive chronic disease, which matches users with registered dietitians for a personalised approach to health.
  

• 🌾 New York-based Blackbird Foods secured $1.5M seed funding to scale operations of its high-protein seitan, made by extracting protein directly from wheat flour, and expand into retail chains. 
  

• 🥬 Urban farmers Peas & Love raised €1M to expand its footprint across Europe. Its vertical farms are set up in disused areas such as rooftops, and consumers can either pick the produce directly or have it delivered

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• 🍺 Danish startup Zymoscope secured €960k to commercialise its product, a data-driven fermentation solution which allows brewers to better control and optimise their fermentation processes.
  

• 📦 MealMe.ai closed a $900k seed funding round for its food-based search engine, which allows users to search for a food or restaurant and then displays price points from various food-delivery apps, ensuring price and delivery speed transparency. It also allows for in-app checkout, regardless of the selected provider.
  

• ♻️ British packaging startup SoluBlue raised £430k to scale up its technology and pilot production of its sustainable seaweed-based alternative to plastic packaging.
  

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Mergers & Acquisitions:

• 🥂The world’s biggest producer of champagne, LVMH, has taken a 50% stake in Armand de Brignac, the high-end champagne brand owned by rapper Jay-Z, for an undisclosed amount, to try and bolster sales through a difficult period.

• 🍲 Nestlé has agreed to acquire UK recipe kit company Simply Cook, to expand its portfolio of D2C businesses at a time of a major boom in at-home dining.

• 🍯 Honey-infused spirits brand The British Honey Company is acquiring Union Distillers for £8M, to add its Two Birds brand to its portfolio and increase its own market presence and customer base.

• 🥤 The Coca-Cola Company is rumoured to be buying a controlling interest in sports drink brand Bodyarmor, a transaction that would leave Coca-Cola with the second and third-largest sport drinks brands in the US.

• 🌾 Crop science firm FluroSat is merging with soil health startup Dagan to become a new company, Regrow, focused on providing “resilient agriculture” solutions.

• 🥬 Vertical farming company Kalera has acquired Vindara, a firm which develops seeds specifically for an indoor farming environment, to increase its crop yield and speed of its growth cycles in its current and future facilities.