Italy-based impact fund Maia Ventures has launched its first fund at €55 million ($64 million) that will support early-stage food and ag ventures addressing health, resilience, and efficiency in the food system.
The fund is fully operational and has already made six investments to date.
As an impact fund, Maia’s investment areas fall into three main impact buckets, say founding partners David Bassani and Andrea Galassi: health, efficiency, and resiliency.
These are areas that also resonate with business, too, addressing things like corporate health and moving the agrifood industry forward, Galassi tells AgFunderNews.
Health includes “anything that can support a healthier agrifood industry,” he adds.
“Think about gut health or sugar reduction or weight loss management”
Maia has already made investments in those areas via portfolio companies Lembas, which has developed a peptide to enhance GLP-1 response, and ready-to-eat plant-based products-maker Cappellini. The firm has also invested in Exolab, which makes ingredients for cosmetic products and supplements via plant-derived exosomes.
Efficiency might include digitization and AI for agriculture, waste reductions, and solutions that enable “having either more output with the same input or less input for the same output, or both,” says Galassi.
Portfolio companies such as genomic analysis platform GenoGra and food safety compliance SaaS Biorsaf illustrate this area.
Meanwhile, alternative ingredients startup Foreverland, which makes a carob-based “chocolate” product, speaks to building more resilience into the food sector.
Initial ticket sizes for the new fund range from €0.5 to 1.5 million, says Maia, which plans to back a total of 20 to 25 companies including those named above.
The firm expects to make a final close of the fund “in the coming months.”
‘A good time to be deploying capital’
Maia Ventures’ limited partner (LP) base includes institutional investors the European Investment Fund (EIF) and CDP Venture Capital Sgr. Private investors include “leading Italian food corporates and their family offices” such as Teseo Capital sicav-sif, Cereal Docks (through its CVC Grey Silo Ventures), and Andriani.
When it came time to choosing investors, Bassani explains that Maia steered clear of “tourist investors”—those investing in a space that may not necessarily understand it on a deep level. Agrifoodtech saw this play out in the early 2020s, when generalist investors rushed to fund alternative protein and indoor farming startups.
“We realized that the way to fundraise was not to go to ‘tourists’ but to approach institutions, corporates and family offices connected to corporates in the agrifood food space,” Bassani tells AgFunderNews.
“These are the people who are not subject to fads and trends. These are the guys who know the real problems, and these guys are the ones who want solutions to [those] problems.”
He adds that while the fundraise process “wasn’t easy” in the current economic environment, it’s now “a good time to be deploying capital.”
“I think we’re in a privileged position to invest into problems that matter.”
“We invested in Maia Ventures because it connects Italy’s world-class food industry with breakthrough agrifoodtech innovation,” Claudia Pingue, head of tech transfer fund of CDP Venture Capital, said in a statement.
“The team’s deep expertise and robust network enable them to identify high-impact deep-tech solutions at the intersection of nutraceutical, food and health, where long-term value and systemic resilience are established.”
Going deep on due diligence
Agrifoodtech funding is still on the decline, which Galassi says is mainly the result of a lack of exits and unrealistic expectations on the part of investors and startups alike.
Now, says Galassi, “It’s important to be part of a new wave of agrifoodtech that balances out the different challenges in the most efficient possible way.
“It’s important to invest in disruption, especially looking at biotech. At the same time, as part of our portfolio, we need to develop healthy PNLs, and healthy PNLs have way more exit opportunities. So this is a two-fold approach of risk-return that needs to be taken.”
Bassani adds: “We are [conducting] due diligence is very disciplined way, and we go very, very deep. A lot of funds in the past were maybe not so deep into it. But this is science. If you want to play in this game, you need to to go deeper.”
The post Breaking: Italy’s Maia Ventures launches $64m agrifood fund backed by EIF and others appeared first on AgFunderNews.
