November 3, 2020

By Lynda Kiernan, Global AgInvesting Media

Bits x Bites, the first agrifood tech-focused VC focused on the Chinese market announced that it has completed its first $30 million close for its new $70 million fund – the leading and only fund of its kind investing in transformative technologies with the potential to create a more sustainable and resilient food supply chain. 

Over the past three decades, China has rapidly undergone a significant shift from being largely rural and agrarian to a more urban and market-engaged society. This rather jolting change has brought food production away from fragmented small holders and into the realm of commercially-scaled industrial agricultural production. And although this has resulted in a rising of the standard of living in the country, it has also created a system fraught with challenges to be addressed, including food safety, environmental contamination, and standards of animal husbandry.

Managed by  general partners Matilda Ho and Joseph Zhou, Bits x Bites backs early stage Chinese and international innovators to advance bioscience, data science, and processing technologies that can answer these particular challenges through advances across precision agriculture, crop and animal health, alternative proteins, and nutrition.

Ho explained that China has seen impressive development of a digital ecosystem that has fostered widespread e-grocery and food delivery penetration, adding that it is these downstream platforms that have been the drivers of investment in China’s food and retail spaces.

However, it is important to note that without investment in upstream innovations, farm production won’t be able to keep pace with the rapidly growing and shifting food demands.

“With African Swine Flu, COVID, and uncertain trade relations, nothing else is more urgent in China today than growing the self-sufficiency and sustainability in food production,” said Matilda Ho, founder and managing director, Bits x Bites. “Whether it is a discovery platform for novel agri inputs, bio-manufacturing of high-demand functional ingredients, or machine learning for farm automation, these process innovations are vital for raising our food system’s productivity and improving the nutritional and safety performance of our food product.”

Backing Bits x Bites in its mission are some of the world’s leading LPs that represent global industrial footprints across both biosciences and food including Singapore’s Temasek; Heritas Capital Management, another investment firm out of Singapore that focuses on health and food technologies; the CEO of Monde Nissin – a Philippine food company that owns UK alternative meat company Quorn; and several Chinese and Southeast Asian food conglomerates and family offices.

“…without biotech and ingredient innovation midstream, food products will fall short of consumers’ expectation in nutrition, clean label, taste, value, and transparency,” said Ho. “These opportunities are what brought Bits x Bites and our LPs together. We are grateful to have investors who share our vision so that in this economic watershed year, we can invest in emerging companies like Mojia Bio to shift our production toward sustainability.” 

This new fund has made its first new investment in Mojia Bio – a Chinese industrial company that produces essential nutrients using a proprietary bio-manufacturing process that increases yield and reduces the environmental and by-product-related pollution often experienced with conventional synthesis. 

“We are more than a VC because we are vested as strategic partners with deep industry access and real resources across the supply chain to help our startups succeed,” stated Bit x Bites on its website. 

This ethos is manifested by Bits x Bites through follow-on investments made through this new fund in previous portfolio companies – UK-based CRISPR gene editing company Tropic Biosciences, and Israel-based chickpea protein concentrate company InnovoPro.

And while the new fund is beginning a new portfolio and committing to follow-on investments, it is also expected to have a final close in the coming months. 

– Lynda Kiernan is editor with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, and HighQuest Group’s Oilseed & Grain News. She is also a contributor to the GAI Gazette. She can be reached at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.com.