It’s game on for the FoodTech World Cup.
Hundreds of Founders spanning 49 countries applied to take part in the inaugural competition, in collaboration with Givaudan.
Here we introduce the 46 breakthrough startups representing 25 countries pitching in the FoodTech World Cup Semi Finals, taking place as regional Demo Days in front of an expert Jury.
Next up: Startups from each region will be selected to compete in the FoodTech World Cup Final, at the HackSummit, where a winner will be crowned.
Highlights of the breakthrough technologies include:
🌾 Climate-smart farming
🧫 Cell culture technologies
🔬 Bioreactor breakthroughs
💊 AI for personalised nutrition
🍗 NextGen protein technologies
⭕ Upcycling waste side streams
🍴 Farm to fork food waste reduction
🎟️ Get your ticket today to watch the finalists pitch live at the HackSummit and meet them in person.
And spend two high-impact days (June 13-14) surrounded by great company as 100s of Founders and Funders come together to make their next deals under one roof.
46 startups bringing their A-Game to the Semi Finals:
Europe
🇧🇪 Bolder Foods
Co-Founder and CEO: Ilana Taub
Harnessing the power of submerged biomass fermentation to create ingredients for the next wave of cheese alternatives.
🇫🇷 Bon Vivant
Co-Founders: Stéphane Mac Millan and Hélène Briand
Producing milk proteins through precision fermentation, enabling dairy producers to make dairy products with lower environmental impact, without compromising taste or nutrition.
🇪🇸 CULTZYME
Founder and CEO: Juan Garzón
Developing innovative, efficient bioreactors integrating the latest hardware with AI and cloud computing to accelerate the development of sustainable alternative proteins and life-saving therapies.
🇵🇱 Ecobean
CEO and Co-Founder: Marcin Koziorowski
Turning coffee waste into sustainable chemicals with a low carbon footprint with applications across various industries, including food, cosmetics and packaging.
🇬🇧 Extracellular
Founder and CEO: Will Milligan
CDMO for the sustainable bio-economy, providing a R&D platform, enabling technologies and biomanufacturing solutions to companies seeking to create sustainable alternatives to consumer products using biotechnology.
🇮🇹 Foreverland Food
Co-Founder and CEO: Massimo Sabatini
Providing sustainable alternatives to unsustainable foods such as chocolate by developing a cacao-free chocolate that tastes like chocolate but is better for both people and the planet.
🇩🇪 Neggst Foods
Co-Founder, Co-CEO and CTO: Verónica García Arteaga
Making a 100% plant-based egg alternative consisting of Neggst white and Neggst yolk - just like its animal-made counterpart.
🇫🇮 Perfat Technologies
Co-Founder and CEO: Jyrki Lee-Korhonen
Leveraging material physics to deliver healthy, plant based fats to replace traditional, unhealthy solid fats such as butter, palm oil and coconut oil in a broad range of food applications.
🇪🇸 Poseidona
Founder and CEO: Sònia Hurtado
Providing high quality protein ingredients from seaweed side-streams and invasive algae to support manufacturers develop the tastiest food products.
🇩🇪 Protein Distillery
Co-Founders: Christoph Pitter and Marco Ries
Producing clean protein ingredients sourced from fermented biomass materials, such as brewer’s yeast to provide food companies with clean and functional protein ingredients.
Latin America
🇨🇱 ByBug
Co-Founder and CBO: Gerardo Bluske
Designing genetically improved insects (black soldier fly) that enable insect breeders to transform organic waste into valuable and carbon-negative recombinant proteins.
🇦🇷 Food4You
Co-Founder and CEO: Antonieta Rodriguez de Olmos
Developing unique bacteria combinations, which improve the characteristics of plant substrates undergoing fermentation, such as texture, flavour, and nutrition, in a shorter fermentation time.
🇲🇽 Forma Foods
CEO: Li Lam
Designing the future of meat through 3D printing technology, starting with a 100% plant-based structured product.
🇨🇱 Frankles
CEO: Francisca Schäfer
Enabling AgriFood side streams into high biocompound, novel raw extracts for millions of ingredient developments.
🇧🇷 Future Cow
Founder and CEO: Leonardo Vieira
Using precision fermentation to replicate the molecular proteins produced by cows in labs, without any animal cells being taken - just a digitized copy of the cow gene.
🇦🇷 Kresko
CEO and Co-Founder: Silvana Spinelli
Designing an entirely new class of supplements extracted from fresh foods, based on RNA technologies.
🇦🇷 Nat4Bio
Co-Founder and CEO: Joaquin Fisch
Leveraging biotechnology to reduce food waste between the farm and retail with microbial-based and cell-free coatings for post-harvest fruit protection.
🇧🇷 Typcal
Founder and CEO: Paulo Ibri
Developing a new ingredient for the food industry, through mycelium fermentation and circular economy.
🌎 Vexxel Biotech
Co-Founder and CEO: Milagros Romano
Developing targeted biocapsules for agricultural inputs that enhance crop production.
🇧🇷 Yeda
Co-Founder and CEO: Fernando Slamovitz
Preventing and treating metabolic diseases through biotechnology and artificial intelligence.
APAC
🇸🇬 Another Food
CEO: Stéphane Chen
Developing sustainable food from plant cells through cell culture, starting with coffee.
🇸🇬 Elevate Foods
Founder: Gayatri Bhatia
Elevating Indian farm-gate processors to sell traceable produce globally.
🇸🇬 ImpacFat
Co-Founder and CEO: Mandy Hon
Creating cell-based fish fat that is nutrition-customisable to deliver tastier, wholesome plant-based and cultivated meats, enhanced by flavour, texture and omega-3.
🇦🇺 Magic Valley
Founder and CEO: Paul Bevan
Offering sustainable, healthy cultivated meat as a disruptive force in the $1.4T USD global meat market.
🇮🇳 Terramatter
Co-Founder: Shriyansh Sonawane
Creating valuable functional ingredients by working with organisms that utilise CO2 as its feed. Through a fermentation process they have developed proteins that can be used as ingredients in functional supplements, plant-based meat, to substitute soymeal and fortify pet food.
Sub-Saharan Africa
🇪🇹 Coffee resurrect
Founder and CEO: Almaw Molla
Leveraging sustainable industrial biotechnology, to convert coffee waste in Africa into 100% natural ingredients suitable for personal care, food, and beverage products.
🇺🇬 FiberFoods
Co-Founder: Inez van Oord
Creator of PrimeJack, an easy to use 100% natural meat-like ingredient that rehydrates to 8 times its weight.
🇳🇬 Kitovu Technology
Founder and CEO: Emeka Nwachinemere
Building climate-smart farming and post-harvest infrastructure to enable smallholder farmers in Africa to optimise their productivity and transform their livelihoods.
🇬🇭 Legendary Foods
Founder and CEO: Shobhita Soor
Delivering the nutrition of meat at the price and sustainability of plants using advanced insect agriculture.
Middle East and North Africa
🇮🇱 Arrakis Bio
Co-Founder and CEO: Fabian Trumper
Developing technology to produce man-made collagen 100X more efficiently through cultivated mammalian cells at unprecedented quality and cost, opening up new markets and possibilities for this versatile and essential protein.
🇮🇱 BOB Foodtech
Co-Founder and CEO: Tal Malca Salhuv
Pioneering novel solutions for small molecule extraction and cultivated media recycling, with their first solution focusing on reducing costs for the cultivated meat and seafood sector.
🇮🇱 Day8
Co-Founder and CEO: Daniel Rejzner
Extracting Rubisco from discarded crop leaves, offering the most taste-neutral, cost-effective and sustainable protein ingredient.
🇮🇱 Finally Foods
Co-Founder and CEO: Dafna Gabbay
Modifying plants by using proprietary AI to plan and produce complex proteins, starting with casein. The "host" for their casein is a potato that serves as a “bioreactor” to express the micellar casein.
🇮🇱 Gavan
Co-Founder and CEO: Itai Cohen
Developing Fatrix, a plant-based fat alternative that's healthy and cost-efficient to meet consumer expectations in taste, texture, and cooking properties.
🇮🇱 Kokomodo
Co-Founder and CEO: Tal Govrin
Producing real, controlled, climate-resilient cacao year-round with cell culture technology.
🇦🇪 Manhat
Founder: Saeed Alhassan
Focusing on patented "natural water distillation" technology for sustainable water and floating farm solutions.
🇮🇱 Maolac
Founder and CEO: Maya Ashkenazi
Using advanced AI technologies and protein intelligence to identify and isolate, from natural dairy or plant-based sources, specific groups of functional proteins that are indication-specific and carry high bio-similarity to human breastmilk.
🇮🇱 Sweet Victory
Co-Founder and CEO: Gitit Lahav
Revolutionising how people conquer sugar cravings and regain control over their "sweet tooth."
🇲🇦 Terraa
Co-Founder and CEO: Youssef Benkirane
A platform to enable farmers to earn higher incomes and ensure a consistent demand for their products, while providing retailers with high-quality goods at competitive prices.
North America
🇺🇸 Bioeutectics
Co-Founder and CEO: Tomas Silicaro
Developing and designing the next generation of green solvents to replace petrochemical solvents in the food & beverage industry, functional ingredients sector, and many other verticals.
🇺🇸 Cellibre
Founder and CEO: Ben Chiarelli
Employing an organism-agnostic approach to turn cells into specialized, sustainable factories for the manufacture of globally significant products at scale.
🇺🇲 High time Foods
Co-Founder and CEO: Aakash Shah
Bringing shelf-stable, versatile, and nutritious plant-based meat that can easily become part of every chef’s menu.
🇺🇲 Mi Terro
Founder and CEO: Robert Luo
Upcycling agricultural waste into high-value biomaterials to end microplastics and hunger at cheaper price than conventional plastic and reducing CO2 emissions by up to 80%.
🇨🇦 Opalia
Co-Founder and CEO: Jennifer Cote
Developing a technology to make real milk without cows using bovine mammary cells for sustainable, ethical, and functional dairy products.
🇺🇸 Plantible
Co-Founder: Tony Martens Fekini
Unlocking the power of sustainable aquatic plants to produce protein ingredients that outperform the status quo both functionally and nutritionally, without compromises.
🇺🇲 Thola
Founder: Nneile Nkholise
Offering climate sustainability compliance co-pilot for African agricultural and food companies, to increase biosecurity in African food systems.
There’s no shortage of talent taking part in the FoodTech World Cup Semi Finals.
Just like at the HackSummit. Join us at Europe’s largest Climate event this June to mix with the industry’s brightest minds.