Agrifood tech fund The Yield Lab Europe has announced almost €50m for its sustainable agrifood tech venture capital fund, which invests in seed to Series A-stage companies in Ireland and Europe.
The fund invests in technologies that improve the environmental and carbon footprint of the food and agriculture industries, to support the vision and implementation of the European Green Deal and the European Commission's Farm to Fork Strategy.
It has mapped over 2,000 agrifood tech start-ups in Europe.
The latest round of funding saw new investors including the European Investment Fund through the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI), Invest-NL and AIB.
The Irish fund has completed seven investments to date, including Irish start-ups ApisProtect (protecting honey bees and biodiversity), MicroGen Biotech (soil health), Micron Agritech (livestock parasite testing) and Equimetrics (animal health monitoring).
It has also invested in European start-ups N2 Applied (biogenic methane reduction/decarbonisation of livestock), Kaffe Bueno (coffee upcycling) and RootWave (sustainable weed control).
The Yield Lab Europe is also expanding into the Netherlands and will open a Dutch office as part of a new partnership with StartLife, the agrifood tech hub and accelerator for Wageningen University & Research, a leader in agrifood tech innovation and sustainability.
Chairman Paul Finnerty said the fund believes that zero-carbon agriculture and food production is a tremendous opportunity and can be achieved by 2040.
"We have invested and will continue to invest in technologies to enable this transition. We look forward to investing in the innovation that positions Irish agriculture as being properly viewed as part of the climate solution, and not the problem," Mr Finnerty added.
