Aquaculture Dealflow & Notable Reads - 10
Bi-weekly roundup of investments and market movements in aquaculture
Happy Friday fellow readers. It’s been a busy two weeks for mergers and new fund announcements. These are my pick of news items driving the past two weeks. Enjoy and have a great weekend ahead!
Investments
🌿 Cascadia Seaweed, a vertically integrated seaweed producer, lands USD 4.3m from Sustainable Development Technology Canada to construct a 100 ha ocean farm and agrifeed processing facility
🐍 Forsea Foods, alternative eel meat producer leveraging non-GMO organoid platform, raises USD 5.2m seed round led by Target Global with commitment from The Kitchen FoodTech Hub, PeakBridge VC, Zora Ventures, FoodHack, and Milk & Honey Ventures
🐟 Scout, Canada-based canned seafood manufacturer, secures USD 4m in seed funding led by Semillero Partners
Merger & Acquisitions
💵 Private equity fund Altor acquires Bain Capital’s stake in Chilean salmon farmer Nova Austral, with a history of financial and operational missteps
🤖 Norwegian seafood investor Bluefront Equity acquires aquaculture software company Naviaq with >50% share ownership
🏭 Icelandic fishing giant Brim takes 50% stake in Polar Seafood, Greenland’s largest privately-owned fishing and processing business, at a cost of USD 81m
🏭 Pacific Seafood acquires Canadian processor Keltic Seafoods (amount undisclosed)
🍤 NaturalShrimp, pioneer shrimp RAS farming company, enters merger agreement with Yotta Acquisition Group, a public blank check corporation listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange, to receive up to USD 105m
Funding
💵 Propeller announces USD 100m fund to invest in ocean-climate companies in partnership with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
💰 Swen Capital Partners, sustainability focused private equity firm, exceeds EUR 120m target by EUR 38m on Blue Ocean Fund
🥼 Sustainable Aquaculture Innovation Centre (SAIC) opens new funding call for collaborative innovation projects (total: GBP 500,000)
Movements
☠️ Ace Aquatec partners with Stamatiou Aquaculture to distribute award-winning in-water electric stunners to Greece
🦠 Adisseo and Calysta’s single cell protein factory in China goes live, targeting to produce 20,000 tons of FeedKind annually
🐡 ADM launches AquaTrax, innovative feed that harnest yeast Pichia guilliermondii to deliver physiological support in aqua species
🤖 AquaEasy, AIoT solutions for shrimp farmers, brings AI to Vietnam’s shrimp industry with partnership with Grobest Group
🧬 GenoMar opens tilapia breeding and genetics centre in Brazil
🐟 Gigante Salmon, land-based salmon farmer, inks 3 year deal with Skretting targeting to be market-ready by 2024
🌊 Gulf Blue Navigator selects 6 blue tech startups for 6 months program. More details here.
🦐 Hendrix Genetics opens Indonesia broodstock facility, giving nation’s shrimp farmers direct access to SPF vannamei
🪰 Insect Engineers will launch Insect School website on November 1st: https://www.insectschool.com/
🍔 McDonald's warns Alaska pollock industry of rise in nematodes in Filet-O-Fish raw material
🐠 NOAA Sea Grant provides USD 1.4m funding to striped bass farming initiative StriperHub
🌍 Nutreco and parent company SHV partner with FoodTechAfrica and African Parks to promote sustainable aquaculture in Africa. 1st project: construction of RAS tilapia nucleus demo farm in Rwanda
😷 Researchers in Scotland launch a 5 months feasibility project to test first-of-its-kind immunology tool the assess overall salmon health from a single blood sample
🍣 Revo Foods announces research collaboration with Sweden-based biotechnology company Mycorena to explore 3D printing of seafood alternatives using fungi-based mycoprotein
🏭 Scoular, Da Yang Seafood, and Bornstein Seafoods open a new fishmeal processing facility in Oregon to process fish trimmings into fishmeal and fish oil
🧠 Skretting opens USD 6m aquaculture research station in Ecuador to advance innovative feeds for shrimp farming
🌊 UC San Diego unveils 6 startups in 2nd cohort for blue economy accelerator StartBlue Program
🍤 Umami Meats partners with US-based ingredient firm Ingredion to launch cell-based fish cakes and fillets
🇺🇸 US launches Soy Innovation Challenge to increase value of soybean meal in existing markets
Notable Reads
To Stop Illegal Fishing, Send a Seabird by Claudia Geib
“They are an independent, non-biased way to record fishing activities,” says Carlos Zavalaga, a seabird ecologist at Peru’s Scientific University of the South, who leads a project that uses kitted-out Peruvian boobies to monitor the country’s anchovy fisheries. “They just go and feed.”
Bioluminescence Is Nature’s Love Light by Sarah Deweerdt
Then an array of arcs, swirls, and flashes so dense that it is difficult to tell where one light ends and another begins. “All of a sudden, it was like this whole show that was happening,” says Emily Ellis, now a molecular biologist at a biotech company in California, who was once the 22-year-old student in question. “It seemed like it was happening just for us.”