France’s Seventure Partners announced it has launched AVF, an innovative venture capital fund dedicated to backing companies working in the areas of animal feed, nutrition, and health. Concurrently, the firm announced the fund’s first 24 million Euro (US$29.5 million) close, anchored by Adisseo, a leader in the animal feed industry.
Geographically, the new fund will focus on investments in Europe, North America, and Israel, however an expansion into Asia has not been ruled out.
As an expert global voice in feed additives, Adisseo has seven research centers, a production facility, and 1,900 employees based across Europe and China dedicated to the development and production of sustainable animal feed and nutritional solutions.
The group’s investment strategy targets two pillars: animal health, feed, and nutrition, and digital technologies that improve the livestock industry. Through this mandate, the firm sees digestibility, energy potential, and traceability within the animal food chain as having the ability to lessen the environmental effects of the livestock industry while also providing investment opportunities. Meanwhile, digital technologies such as smart breed and diagnosis programs and traceability tools are key innovations as the category is being driven by concerns surrounding climate change, resource scarcity, the need to maintain biodiversity, and demands from consumers.
Adisseo is a unique company committed to strategic investments in new disruptive technologies, in order to enrich our portfolio of R&D innovations while respecting a mode of sustainable growth,” said Jean-Marc Dublanc, CEO of Adisseo. “Our ambition is to become one of the leaders in Feed Ingredient Specialties and the experienced partner of choice in animal nutrition… With AVF, our goal is to invest in strategic collaborations combining the agility of start-ups with Adisseo’s expertise. As such, Seventure was a natural partner of choice and we are pleased to become a strategic investor in AVF.”
Seventure also notes how shifting consumer demands, sustainability and environmental benchmarks, global population growth, and demographic changes are driving change for the global livestock industry – changes that create disruption and opportunities for innovation and investment.
“This new thematic fund was created to address a very specific and expanding need in the market: preserving animal health, gaining a better understanding of the entire food value chain, as well as developing technologies to cultivate and produce food in a better way,” said Isabelle de Cremoux, CEO and managing partner at Seventure Partners.
Themes
Since 1997 Seventure has been investing in digital tech companies in France and Germany and life science-focused companies in Europe, North America, and Israel; growing to more than 690 million Euro (US$849 million) in assets under management as of the end of last year, reports Feedstuffs.
“After the successful launch of Health for Life Capital™, which raised €160m (US$197 million) with strategic partners such as Danone, Novartis, Tereos, Lesaffre and Bel to invest in the microbiome, digital innovation and in human health/nutrition/food, we are now launching AVF, a new fund in animal health and nutrition,” said Cremoux.
This eye toward food and nutrition by Seventure was reflected in the firm’s backing of Colorado-based mushroom-focused food tech startup MycoTechnology, which announced the official closing of its oversubscribed Series B at $42 million in October of last year.
Founded in 2013 by Dr. Brooks Kelly, Jim Langan, Peter Lubar, and Alan Hahn, MycoTechnology has pioneered the development of a variety of new food processing systems using mushroom roots (mycelium). Although the full range of possibilities for their technology is not yet known, the company has used their platform to solve some of the toughest challenges faced by the food and beverage industries, including removing unwanted compounds from foods, adding beta glucans and highly digestible proteins to raw agricultural materials, naturally reducing the bitterness in coffee, improving the taste of chocolate without added sugar, removing gluten content from wheat, and achieving the critical application of removing the bitter aftertaste of stevia.
-Lynda Kiernan