Participated · Series A · Jun 2023

Bluu Seafood develops cultivated (lab-grown) fish products using stem-cell technology derived from a one-time fish biopsy that does not require killing fish. The company unveiled first products in August, including fish sticks and fish balls made from cultivated fish cells enriched with plant proteins to improve mouth-feel and cooking. Bluu was founded in Berlin in 2020 as Bluu Biosciences. The startup is focusing on regulatory approval and commercialisation, targeting Singapore (expects approval sometime in 2024), has initiated the FDA approval process, and plans to enter European markets thereafter. Financially, the company had previously raised €7.1 million and is now funded to pursue market entry and scaling. Bluu positions its products as a response to overfishing, contamination and animal-cruelty issues in seafood production. Bluu Biosciences is developing lab-grown salmon, trout and carp, with a particular focus on carp as an attractive target for large Asian markets. The company leverages immortalized fish cell lines developed by co‑founder Sebastian Rakers, who cultivated and immortalized cell lines from more than 20 fish species during research at the Fraunhofer Institute. Bluu says those immortalized cells allow vastly greater proliferation than normal cells, which the founders describe as a strong competitive advantage for scaling production. The startup plans to have a prototype product by the end of 2022 and is actively pushing for regulatory progress as one of the last obstacles to commercialization. Bluu raised €7 million in the announced financing to accelerate commercialization and to benefit from emerging technology providers in media, bioreactors and scaffolding. Founders Simon Fabich and Sebastian Rakers aim to focus on the Asian market, where shifting production behavior could have the biggest sustainability impact.

Participated · Equity · Aug 2020

Plant Jammer builds a user-friendly software platform that applies AI to databases of food and flavor science to generate personalized plant-based recipes and prioritize ingredients users already have. The company offers a consumer app and a white-label API for partners and corporate customers. Management says the product helps reduce food waste, shift diets toward plant-based options, and improve users' culinary skills. Plant Jammer plans to focus on improving the performance of its AI rather than expanding into new offerings in the near term. The startup was founded in Copenhagen in 2016, has 15 employees, and has exceeded 100,000 users across Denmark, Germany, the UK and the US. Company leadership said Covid-19 has been a "boom time" for growth.