Wageningen, the Netherlands-based Greencovery, a startup that has developed a separation-purification technology for upcycling food side streams, announced on Thursday that it has secured €500K funding from Brightlands Venture Partners.
The food processing industry is constantly trying to reduce waste and looking for opportunities to valorise their side streams and develop new products.
Greencovery says the fresh capital will help it to accelerate its cost-effective platform technology to separate and purify novel specialty ingredients from food processing streams and scale up capacity to broaden its customer base in the food industry.
Carlos Cabrera, CEO and co-founder of Greencovery, says, “WUR research calculated that only the global food industry wastes a food value equivalent of €2B per year. We are able to create novel specialty ingredients from these food industry side streams, thereby contributing to a much more sustainable food production system. We are very happy with the onboarding of Brightlands Venture Partners. This investment will help us to set a solid foundation to accelerate growth for the next funding round.”
Greencovery: What you need to know
Founded by Carlos Cabrera and Juan Cajiao in 2018, Greencovery, with a team of chemical engineers and food technologists, has developed a new technology that helps food manufacturers recover valuable products from their side streams more effectively than any other technologies in the market.
According to the founding duo, they invested most of their life understanding the challenges around the recovery of side streams and developing feasible and scalable methods to extract ingredients, supplements, additives, and esters from side-streams.
The first market launch was a banana extract from a vinegar side stream, then a natural ‘clean label’ parmesan umami flavour as an alternative to other umami extracts and cheese flavours.
Investors
Brightlands Venture Partners (BVP) is the Fund manager of the Brightlands Agrifood Fund and is a so-called ecosystem investor.
BVP invests in companies benefiting from and contributing to the Brightlands campuses in the South of the Netherlands. Funds under management include BVP fund IV, Brightlands Agrifood Fund, Chemelot Ventures, and Limburg Ventures.
Marcel Zijp of Brightlands Venture Partners says, “The potential of the technology, the team, and their commitment to contribute to sustainable use of the earth’s resources in our human food production system are key elements for us to invest. This investment fits our portfolio well and our aim to contribute to a more sustainable food production system as well as Brightlands’ expertise in the food-value chain.”
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