The London Technology Club (LTC), which includes some of the world’s leading technology investors, has participated in Agronomics oversubscribed equity fundraise of approximately GBP10 million. Aim-listed Agronomics (AIM:ANIC) is an investor in cellular agriculture with a focus on cultivated meat and alternative proteins.
The fundraising will provide additional capital for Agronomics to make additional investments, following the completion of investments earlier this year in Mosa Meat, Meatable, Solar Foods, the LIVEKINDY co, VitroLabs, and Tropic Biosciences. These technologies are driving a major disruption in agriculture, offering solutions to improve sustainability, as well as addressing human health, animal welfare and environmental damage. This disruption will decouple supply chains from the environment and animals, as well as being fundamental to feeding the world’s expanding population.
Investment in the cultivated meat market is growing extremely rapidly with cUSD150 million invested globally between 2016 – 2019. Over USD250 million has already been raised in 2020 alone with further material raises anticipated as funding requirements growing rapidly in the near term to build out manufacturing facilities. AT Kearney, a global consultancy, has predicted that Cultivated Meat’s market share of meat consumption will be 35 per cent by 2040.
London Technology Club Founder and Chief Executive Officer Konstantin Sidorov, says: “We’re delighted to have invested in Agronomics alongside Jim Mellon who is one of the leading investors in cellular agriculture globally at the moment and a regular and active participant at LTC events. Our investment in Agronomics is very much in-line with our goal of supporting the growth of potentially global scale businesses. Agri-tech is an especially exciting area at the moment and one where the UK is already a global leader. Agronomics is backing a portfolio of exciting innovators and future leaders. Watch this space.
As we highlighted in our recent report on the subject, the technological transformation of food, nutrition and agriculture has the potential to be a global scale revolution in terms of how we consume food and use land, allowing significant decarbonisation and freeing up millions of acres of land for other uses while meeting increasing demand for food and building higher levels of nutrition.”
Jim Mellon, Non-Executive Director of Agronomics, says: “Agronomics is at the forefront of a rapidly developing field that will reshape traditional agricultural production by offering more sustainable methods for producing meat and other animal or environmentally intensive products. The impact that these companies could have on a global stage is enormous and forward-thinking private investors such as those at LTC are an important part of scaling up those businesses. Demand for these types of products is on the rise and investment is required to enable the companies to ultimately lower the cost of their products so that they can be a viable alternative to traditional methods of food production.”
