Section
Rounds, valuations, exits and the shifting appetite of food-tech capital.
Liberation Labs (2023), Voyage Foods (2024) and Plantible (2026) each closed a $25m USDA Business & Industry guaranteed loan, the programme maximum per borrower. USDA guarantees 80% of it and charges a 3% fee on that portion; the borrower still owes all of it. For a $115m plant, that is 22% of the capital.
Interim accounts furnished nine days before the Perfecta retail launch show zero revenue for H1 2026, $264,000 of cost of goods sold, $1.06m of cash against a $3.3m half-year burn, and substantial doubt about the company continuing as a going concern.
Ÿnsect, Enorm, Aspire and AgroLoop failed building mega-factories, so the sector's answer was to put the larvae on the farm. Goterra entered administration on 3 June 2026; FarmInsect's Munich administrator ended operations in September. Its EU-funded project called the model 'profitable' nine months before it filed.
Chile's first unicorn raised $235m at a $1.5bn valuation in 2021. Since 2024 it has handed North America to Kraft Heinz, sold Argentina and Uruguay to Molinos, closed Mexico without a buyer and sold Brazil to Ferrara. The only filing is a one-page Buenos Aires notice with no number in it. Chile has until December.
GFI Europe reports €236m raised in H1 2026, up 56% year on year. The same post puts global funding at €306m, down from €341m. Subtract one from the other and the rest of the world falls from roughly €190m to €70m. The rebound is a composition shift, not a recovery.
Unibio's audited accounts put its indicated demand pipeline at 48,000 tonnes a year — letters of intent and MOUs, by the company's own definition. The Jubail plant SIIG has costed at SAR 1.4 billion will make 50,000. The accounts also flag the 2028 start date and suspend all travel to the region.
MOA Foodtech's February 2025 headline was €2.3m of grant plus €12.5m of EIC Fund equity. Its September 2026 round activates the first €1m tranche of that equity and brings total financing raised since 2020 to €12.3m — less than the single commitment announced 562 days earlier.
A three-significant-figure cost multiple, disclosed in a LinkedIn post, attached to a round of undisclosed size, eleven months after the company cut its Leuven staff. The ratio is precise. Every quantity it is a ratio of is missing, including the resulting cost per kilogram.
Monde Nissin's Protein segment turned ₱7,381m of H1 2026 sales into ₱106m of core net income after tax. The filing prints the margin itself: 1.4%. Impairments booked against the same business since 2022 come to roughly ₱40.7bn on our arithmetic.
GFI's 2026 report calls non-food diversification common, citing IntegriCulture's profitability. Upside Foods opened a life-sciences division, Uncommon Bio moved to therapeutics, Wildtype to skincare. Cultimate sold one cultivated-fat ingredient into cultivated meat, and wound down in August.
The $4.3bn CVC deal converts to about $3.8bn of net cash, and IFF's own filings say where it goes: over $1bn of debt reduction and $2.5bn of buybacks. None of it returns to the food ingredients layer.
Verley's '$38m Series A' is €25m of equity plus €7m of non-dilutive support from Bpifrance. Standing Ovation's '$34.2m' is €25m of equity plus €5m from Bpifrance and a banking syndicate. Neither says whether that money is a grant, a repayable advance or a loan, and the same state institution sits on both sides.
The only London-listed pure-play clean-food portfolio publishes a quarterly NAV built from other investors' priced rounds. At 30 June 2026 that NAV was 12.93p a share and the market paid 5.64p. Its most recent audited accounts cover a year that ended fourteen months ago.
Green Queen's tracker reports 82 alternative-protein consolidation events since September 2024. GFI's State of the Industry report gives at least 19 plant-based acquisitions for 2025. Neither states its inclusion rule prominently, and aligned on unit and window the gap nearly closes.
The company's own releases put contracted revenue at 'approximately $450 million' and never state a currency. Green Queen read it as Canadian and converted; vegconomist and the wire did not. Phytokana wrote 'C$38 million' on its own website in 2024, so the omission is a change in practice.
GFI counted $881m of alternative protein funding in 2025 and named five consolidation deals. In three of them the acquirer was another startup, not an incumbent — and the disclosed prize was bioreactor capacity, cell lines and regulatory filings rather than revenue.
Believer Meats raised $387m and spent roughly $154m on its Wilson plant. UPSIDE Foods' $50m stalking-horse bid sets the floor, with an auction due on 17 August — while a separate Israeli process sells the cell lines, media recipes and control software, some of it sitting in freezers inside that same building.
Believer Meats, Meatable and SCiFi Foods raised more than half a billion dollars combined and still shut down. CellRev and Upstream Foods, suppliers to that same industry, raised a fraction of that and failed on the same timeline — testing the 'picks-and-shovels' thesis against the actual data.
Twenty-three disclosed rounds and $367m over twelve months — but the top ten deals took 84% of it, and nothing crossed $100m. A breakdown of where capital actually went, which categories are being quietly repriced, and what investors now require before writing a cheque.