EIT Food announces three new investments into high-performing agrifood start-ups

Three top performing start-ups selected from EIT Food’s existing entrepreneurship programmes will receive up to EUR 500K in financial support.

With 28 investments in total, EIT Food has one of the world’s largest investor portfolios specialising in agrifood early-stage ventures.

EIT Food, the world’s largest food innovation community, has today announced three new investments in high performing agrifood start-ups 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.

Through its Startup Impact Fund, EIT Food provides direct funding of up to EUR 500 000 per venture to a select number of high-performing agrifood companies, whose innovation activities are contributing to making the global food system more sustainable, healthy, and trusted.

The funding opportunity is open to all EU agrifood start-ups 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 crop inputs. 
• 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: “MaGie Creations is committed to help reduce the ecological footprint of our food production. Partnering with EIT Food accelerates the speed with which we bring our 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.”

Benedicte O’Sullivan, COO of Fyteko, said: “Fyteko is honoured to receive the support of EIT food, an organisation that shares our values and ambitions in moving towards more sustainable agriculture. 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.”

“We are delighted to announce new investments in three of the most promising start-ups in our entrepreneurship programmes. EIT Food’s Startup Impact Fund acts as a bridge for high-performing agrifood start-ups to transition from a regional to a European and global investment scope, increasing their visibility to attract interest from other investors.

“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 start-ups with an outstanding definition of their value proposition and proprietary technologies that can increase the sustainability, health and integrity of our food value chain.”

Benoit Buntinx, Director of Business Creation at EIT Food

For more information, please contact:  communication@eitfood.eu