C9 Capital

Source: https://agfundernews.com/impactvision-acquired-by-apeel-to-look-inside-fruit-veg-for-freshness.html

Apeel Sciences, the food waste technology company, has acquired hyperspectral imaging startup ImpactVision. This is Apeel’s first acquisition, and the Santa Barbara-based company says it stands to dramatically reduce the 40% of produce that’s wasted globally each year.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Apeel is known for its plant-based ‘peel’ product which can be applied to the outside of fruits and vegetables, doubling their shelf life.

San Francisco-based ImpactVision’s imaging tech will allow suppliers to see ‘inside’ their fresh produce to better understand its ripeness, freshness, nutritional density, and other indicators of quality. This could allow suppliers to know the exact ripening window for each individual fruit and vegetable, enabling them to sort and ship accordingly.

“[With this acquisition] we’re expanding our technology to bring to light the previously invisible characteristics of produce, including internal quality, phytonutrient content, and environmental impact,” said James Rogers, CEO at Apeel.

“For our partners, this will mean less waste and an immediate bottom-line improvement – and ultimately, the ability to one day differentiate produce by making freshness and nutritional content ‘visible’ to the consumer.”

Rob Leclerc, founding partner at San Francisco-based VC firm AgFunder — an early backer of ImpactVision — said the acquired startup’s hyperspectral technology has “the ability to create a deep digital understanding of every fruit and vegetable ranging from ripeness prediction to nutritional signatures, and to address key issues of food waste.”

“Integrating with the Apeel platform is a great next step to realize the potential of this technology and bring better transparency and understanding to our food system,” he added.

Apeel’s core product is currently applied to fruits and vegetables using equipment the company has deployed in packing houses and distribution centers across the Americas and Europe. Apeel will implement ImpactVision’s imaging tech with this equipment to collect data-rich images as produce travels along conveyance lines. These images will then be processed through machine learning models that can identify unique visual cues that relate to freshness, degree of maturity, and other aspects of produce quality.

“When [ImpactVision’s] ability to see beyond the borders of human vision is combined with Apeel’s shelf-life extension technology, the potential to fundamentally transform produce supply chains to reduce post-harvest loss, optimize distribution, and lengthen shelf-life is enormous,” said Abi Ramanan, founder of ImpactVision.

Based on the US Department of Agriculture‘s estimate that between 30% and 40% of the country’s food supply goes to waste each year, a more robust and holistic understanding of produce quality will help growers and suppliers of fresh produce to reduce these losses by better optimizing distribution.

For example, if Apeel’s tech can let suppliers know the exact ripening window for each piece of fruit in a consignment, they can sort and ship that consignment to different geographical locations – ensuring retailers in each will receive produce with the longest possible shelf life.

Today, Apeel has 30 supplier integrations on three continents, with plans to double that number by the end of 2021. “With its imaging technology and positioning in the fresh food supply chain, Apeel is on a path to developing the largest and most comprehensive database of objective fresh produce insights for the global food industry,” the company claimed in a statement.

Since it was founded in 2012, Apeel has raised a total of $310 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. Its most recent publicly reported fundraise saw it secure $30 million from Belgian VC Astanor Ventures, Singapore sovereign fund Temasek, and the World Bank‘s International Finance Corporation in October last year.

This followed its $250 million Series A round in May 2020, which was led by GIC — another Singapore sovereign fund — with a host of other investors, including celebrities Oprah Winfrey and Katy Perry, participating.

ImpactVision had raised total funding of $2.8 million according to Crunchbase. Alongside AgFunder, its investors included agrifood specialist VCs Acre Venture Partners and The Yield Lab, as well as Maersk Growth – the corporate venturing arm of Danish shipping giant Maersk.

Source: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/appharvest-announces-acquisition-of-root-ai-and-its-signature-robot-virgo-quick-facts-2021

(RTTNews) – Applied technology company AppHarvest, Inc. (APPH, APPHW) has acquired Root AI, an artificial intelligence farming startup that creates intelligent robots to help manage high-tech indoor farms. Based in Somerville, Mass., Root AI has 19 full-time employees, all of whom are expected to join AppHarvest’s technology group. Root AI CEO Josh Lessing will take on the role of Chief Technology Officer for AppHarvest.

AppHarvest expects acquisition of Root AI and its robotic universal harvester, Virgo, to provide the company with a baseline of harvesting support working alongside crop care specialists focused on more complex tasks. Virgo is the world’s first universal harvester, which can be configured to identify and harvest multiple crops of varying sizes.

The company is investing approximately $60 million, consisting of approximately $10 million in cash and the balance in AppHarvest common shares, to acquire Root AI. The company will issue approximately 2,328,000 shares for the acquisition.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

Source: https://agfundernews.com/agfunder-closes-first-series-ai-enabled-food-ag-tech-funds.html

Online venture capital platform AgFunder, which builds its own technology and A.I. to support its investment team, has raised a $2.25 million fund from the AgFunder community to invest in transformational food and agriculture startups (click here to signup for early access to invest in the next fund). The fund, which will co-invest alongside AgFunder, closed at the end of March, one month after opening to AgFunder’s global network. The fund has already made five investments.

Nearly 40 accredited and institutional investors contributed to the fund including personal investments by senior and C-level executives at some of the major food and agriculture companies who have been following AgFunder for years. Other individual investors include Jason Camm, Chief Medical Officer of Peter Thiel’s family office Thiel Capital.

Institutional investors include SYSTEMIQ, an advisory and investment firm dedicated to the creation of sustainable economic systems in energy, materials, and land use; impact investment fund C9 Capital; and a major US grain merchant.

“We are investing in AgFunder’s Co-Investment Fund due to the quality of deal flow and their expertise in global agtech. We have already begun working closely with the team and hope to contribute to the fund’s future success,” said Ryan Gralia from SYSTEMIQ.

The co-investment fund will invest alongside AgFunder’s own internal fund that counts AgFunder’s founders, investors, advisors, and leading agrifood tech entrepreneurs including Sid Gorham who sold Granular to DuPont (Now Corteva) last year for $300m, Rob Saik who sold Agri-Trend to Trimble, ex-Portfolio Managers of Cargill’s BlackRiver, and Kip Tom who was recently appointed U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. for Food and Ag.

AgFunder will be launching its next co-investment fund in the fall.

“You shouldn’t have to be a Silicon Valley VC to access to some of the best investment opportunities transforming our agrifood tech system. By giving our global network of accredited and institutional investors an opportunity to invest alongside us through these co-investment funds we open the agrifood tech sector to a wider global audience of investors and add value through an engaged ecosystem,” said Rob Leclerc, CEO of AgFunder. “We’ve always believed that the smartest, most value-add investors for the industry are successful entrepreneurs and food and ag professionals. This is an opportunity to tap into that talent pool and it gives us an incredibly smart and dialed-in scout and mentor network.”

The co-investment fund will invest alongside the internal fund in the next 10-12 startups that AgFunder invests in, operating across the value chain, from farm to fork. AgFunder is targeting startups at seed to Series B stage.

The co-investment fund’s first publicly announced portfolio company is Connecterra, the AI-powered dairy technology startup, which we announced in May. The fund has made another four investments in food tech, ag genomics, and remote sensing, all of which will be announced in due course.

AgFunder’s unique model allows it to tap into its global network of over 50,000 members and subscribers to source opportunities, assist with due diligence, and facilitate business development for its portfolio companies. AgFunder’s software engineers are also developing a range of technologies utilizing artificial intelligence to help identify new opportunities,  speed up due diligence, analyze markets, and provide support for its portfolio companies.

“We believe that there is an enormous opportunity investing in early-stage companies that are developing digital and deep technology solutions for the many problems inherent across the food system. Our global platform and AI-enabled data engine allow us to compare technologies across multiple geographies, informing our investment decision-making process, and ultimately deliver superior returns for our fund investors.” said AgFunder CIO, Michael Dean.

“The days of VC as a lifestyle business are over, and in 10-years Limited Partners will be asking VCs how many engineers they have on their team,”  added Rob Leclerc. “It’s not enough anymore to rely on brains, referrals, chance encounters or one’s ‘Rolodex’. This industry is moving too fast and so to drive superior returns we knew we needed a technology edge to help source, diligence, and support our companies. Ultimately we’re running a AgFunder like a startup by  building technology in-house to do VC smarter.”

Source: https://law.duke.edu/news/scott-mikkelsen-06/

In today’s charged political atmosphere, leaders who bring people together to solve problems and implement positive change can be hard to find. Scott Mikkelsen ’06 avoided the rancor that seems synonymous with politics after no one filed to run against him for mayor of Grimes, Iowa, last November.

“Local politics doesn’t have the same toxicity right now as state or national politics,” says Mikkelsen, who took office in Grimes, one of the fastest-growing cities in Iowa, in January. “You’re still able to say, ‘Look, we’re trying to solve problems and come up with solutions for everyone.’ I think some of the real creative solutions happen at the local level.”

Mikkelsen has applied a similar philosophy to his business career. His firm, Midwest Renewable Capital (MRC), leverages a federal tax credit designed to foster investment and economic growth in underserved rural and urban areas to raise capital to invest in renewable energy and clean-tech businesses; a second firm, C9 Capital, is devoted to impact investment venture capital.

MRC now manages more than $350 million worth of investments, much of it in wind, solar, and other environmentally friendly sectors. Mikkelsen says the idea for the company, which uses a combination of private capital and tax credit-enhanced capital, came to him in a Duke Law classroom.

“Our focus has always been triple bottom line,” he says. “We want an environmental return, we want some kind of community return — typically good, quality jobs — and we want business growth and return.”

Maximizing opportunities

Mikkelsen grew up in Dike, Iowa, a farming community of about 1,000 people. When he wasn’t focusing on school or sports, he was, he says, “detasseling corn, ‘walking’ beans, shoveling grain at the co-op — things that are a normal part of growing up in the rural Midwest.”

Recognizing at an early age that he had an interest in business and “a knack” for numbers, he majored in finance at the University of Northern Iowa. An internship with the university controller’s office, during which he worked on a portfolio of fixed-income securities, deepened his interest in finance and led him to obtain a graduate degree in economics at the University of Manchester in the U.K. before joining an institutional research and trading firm in Chicago. A desire to “have a broader impact” subsequently brought Mikkelsen to Duke Law, where the former college football player says he found the faculty equivalent of an “all-star lineup.”

“I had Constitutional Law with William Van Alstyne, Torts with James Boyle, and Contracts with Jerome Reichman,” Mikkelsen recalls. “It was such a great education in thinking deeply and critically, and it has translated into everything else I’ve done.” Working with faculty adviser Erwin Chemerinsky (now the dean of Berkeley Law and another “all star”) to establish the Duke Journal of Constitutional Law and Public Policy was another memorable Duke Law experience, he says.

But Mikkelsen found his calling through Clinical Professor Andrew Foster’s Community Economic Development course and his enrollment in the Community Enterprise Clinic that Foster directs.

While exploring strategies for financing economic opportunity in low-income communities, he learned about how tax credits, including the New Market Tax Credit, can be used to incentivize investment in community redevelopment projects.

Foster showed his students how tax credit-based investment was transforming Durham through such marquee projects as the American Tobacco Campus that anchors the downtown entertainment district and the Golden Belt complex that houses artists’ studios, businesses, and lofts in a refurbished textile mill.

“When Scott was in the class, we went over to Golden Belt on the first day, and they were in the early stages of developing it,” Foster says. “Hearing the developer talk about what it would be like, what they were going to do with all these buildings, how it led to redevelopment of the single-family housing around it, how New Market and Historic Tax Credits helped fuel that project, made it all much more concrete. You really see this concentrated effect of what you can achieve when you bring a lot of resources into one community.”

“It was like a lightbulb went on,” Mikkelsen says. “I thought, ‘I’ve got this private market experience, but I’m also interested in how to solve social problems and public problems.’ The class married those problems and possible solutions, and it grabbed me.”

Bringing it home

Mikkelsen quickly saw the potential New Market Tax Credits held for building businesses in rural communities and for promoting environmental sustainability. Upon graduating from Duke Law in 2006, he headed back to Iowa to practice law and started work on establishing a tax-advantaged fund. He initially focused on wind power, and by 2010 MRC was funding renewable energy businesses and environmentally friendly real estate projects, primarily in the Midwest.

“In 2009, Treasury awarded us the ability to offer partial credit on up to $65 million in investment,” Mikkelsen says. “To that point we’d had commitments from private investors, but everything kind of came to fruition in late 2009. In 2010, Midwest Renewable Capital was going full-time.”

MRC found itself at the forefront in developing early wind projects, he says. But as the sector evolved and became focused on utility projects, Mikkelsen expanded the company’s purview and geographic reach, using New Market Tax Credits for other clean energy, advanced manufacturing, and clean-tech endeavors. This has included companies converting solid waste into biofuels, recycling glass into reflective paint, and converting wood waste into wood pellets. Over the last three years, Mikkelsen has expanded into more traditional venture capital in the clean-tech, ag-tech, and sport-tech sectors through C9 Capital. Collectively, these entities have around $480 million in investments. “We still remain impact investors at our core, we have just expanded our reach,” he says.

Foster says Mikkelsen’s vision for tax credit investment in environmentally sound rural projects was unique, and credits his forward- thinking outlook for his political and business success.

“The New Market Tax Credit has mostly been used for projects like brick-and-mortar redevelopment, and he’s really found a way to fund business activity in the renewable energy space, which lots of people are excited about,” Foster says. “Scott took those lessons from Durham and applied them in a totally different context, which is, I think, one of the things that has made him so successful. His success shows what it means to be a lawyer-leader.”

A new path

Mikkelsen, who claims that just living in Iowa entails paying attention to a “permanent, public political discourse,” found that his longstanding interest in politics deepened and was supplemented by an acute interest in public policy during his time at Duke Law. He got involved in grassroots politics as soon as he and his wife, Amber, moved to Grimes in 2006.

”We are lucky because we have presidential campaigns coming through here every couple years,” he says. “There are a lot of ways to get involved in the political process.”

Raising his four children in a town undergoing explosive growth — Grimes has doubled in size over the past 10 years and is projected to double again in the next 10 — made the decision to run for mayor easy. It also shaped the issues Mikkelsen chose to prioritize: lowering taxes and developing a strategic vision to channel the city’s growth. He says he is focused on vital infrastructure, like roads, and quality-of-life amenities, such as the parks, ball fields, and bike paths that sustain families like his. “I’ve coached my kids’ football, baseball, and basketball teams, and I was an athlete in high school and college, so I know how important those things can be to a community,” he says.

From Grimes, Iowa, to other communities across the country, Mikkelsen is working with local leaders to solve social and public problems. In his business and public leadership roles, Mikkelsen says, “I utilize the same set of problem-solving skills and critical thinking I honed at Duke Law to build teams that implement positive, sustainable solutions.”