Oh, welcome. Welcome everyone. Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, and all of you tuning in. It is with great joy for me to extend a warm hospitality to all of you tonight. Thank you for joining us in what is an incredibly packed week at the Singapore International AgriFood Week.
We gather tonight because we all share a common interest, agriculture and food, and tonight we bring you up close to the frontiers of technology and entrepreneurship. So my team and I, we have the great joy of working with founders to bring to market interesting signs and innovation, but as one frontier pushes the fold and expand, we get into the mainstream area of food, agriculture, fiber, and forestry. And we know the business realities are complex on either side to scale up and to adopt technologies can be challenging and that's why we need believers of tech connectors and end users like you in the audience today to be the other frontier because when two frontiers collide, it creates a movement for something new to take place and this is the movement we're creating at GROW. We bring people together to introduce technologies on the global stage to flourish for cause, the longevity and welfare of people and planet.
So over the years we have launched several initiatives to be that this magnet to attract people to realize this shared vision. A key cornerstone in our portfolio programmes is this accelerator programme the GROW Impact Accelerator with AgFunder. Tonight's demo day marks the completion of six months of acceleration and you will hear from nine startups today together with AgFunder, we provide scale, our business support and mobilize capital to grow these businesses and amplify the impact they make. Well, it's been three years since we've started here in Singapore and this month we turn a new leaf with a brand new look. So this mark is our commitment to continue to push the boundaries of creativity and entrepreneurship so that we can inspire a track support and launch the best agrifoodtech founders onto the global stage. Enterprise Singapore, where are you? Look, we are grateful for the continued support and partnership and we remain aligned with the vision for AgriFood Tech here and in the region to all our partners, coaches, mentors.
Thank you so much for your support throughout the years. Look, three years in the making and we're just getting started, so enjoy what's to come this evening, lean into the pitches and get inspired to continue the conversations even beyond tonight and join us in this movement of food tech for impact. All right, good evening everybody. Thank you once again for being here.
My name is John Friedman. I'm the Asia Director for AgFunder, a global leader in agrifood tech venture capital. I'd like you all to take a moment and think about the last thing you ate. Maybe it was lunch earlier today for some of you, perhaps a quick snack that you bought on the way to the theater.
I want you to think about where did it come from, maybe the ingredients that made it perhaps how long did it travel to get here in Singapore? How many hands has it passed through? Can you even remember these details? The fact is food is a necessity yet too often we take it for granted. Sadly, this isn't the case for the 820 million people around the globe who go to bed each night on an empty stomach. 2022 has been an unprecedented year of hunger from 2019 until now. The number of undernourished has grown by as many as 150 million, a crisis driven by climate change, conflict and the aftershocks of the COVID 19 pandemic. At the same time,
we have 930 million tons of food going to waste every single year according to about 17% of total global production. In addition to the social implications, the environmental impact is equally damning. Between eight to 10% of global carbon emissions can be linked to unconsumed food and over a third of all manmade greenhouse gas emissions by the food system as a whole. Shocking statistics, but the story doesn't have to read like a tragedy. We have an opportunity through innovation to rewrite the narrative.
Three years ago, as Joshua shared, AgFunder launched the GROW Impact Accelerator to identify and invest in agrifoodtech founders who are authoring new chapters of change through technology. By providing catalytic capital and structured support to these startups, we play a material role in accelerating the transformation of our food system. As venture capitalists, we seek outsized commercial returns by investing in solutions that address the world's largest problems while keeping sustainability at the core. To date, AgFunder has invested in over 70 companies across our portfolio and tonight you'll be hearing from nine of them. This year's GROW Impact Accelerator cohort was chosen from over 360 applicants from 78 countries and I'm really excited to introduce them to you.
But first, let me extend a special thanks to our corporate and institutional partners, some of whose logos you see on the screen behind me. Thank you all for joining us in this mission and helping to put technology into action. Finally, if you're in the audience tonight or watching online and interested to learn more about AgFunder, please use the QR codes to connect ladies and gentlemen, together, let's write this next chapter in the story of our global food system. Thank you you once again. This evening we bring together the agrifoodtech community here in the region and across the globe to showcase 10 incredible entrepreneurs and their solutions so that you may forge new partnerships, collaborations, and investments. For those of you here in the audience today and those of you tuning in online, if you're as excited about their solutions as we are, we would encourage you to scan the QR code at the end of each presentation so that you can connect directly with that founder. Alternatively,
you can wait until the final QR code, which will allow you to connect with multiple founders. Our founders have just three minutes to pitch their technologies to you this evening. We handpicked them with a strong belief that each brings a unique differentiator that targets an emerging need in our sector as they scale their impacts. We believe that they are writing a new story of food resilience and tonight we would like to showcase them to you through that story In four chapters, the first chapter, we will start at the beginning right at the source and how we can cultivate a better relationship with our land and our biodiversity. Chapter two, the plot twist, reframing packaging and materials and how we see them today. We then move on to the rising action in protein before concluding with our final chapter on how we can strengthen our supply chain.
Midway through, we have invited Louisa Burwood-Taylor from AgFunder News to share insights from their latest Asia investment reports. We hope that you enjoy the presentations this evening and that you can be inspired for how you can be a co-author in the story of food resilience. Thank you.
Soil is by far the most biologically diverse material on earth. It provides essential nutrients to our forests and crops and vital habitats for pollinating insects such as bees without which it's estimated 80% of what we eat every day would not exist. The first two startups pitching tonight get to the root of biodiversity and regeneration. Their technologies in soil characterization and bee health give us a way to measure, manage, track, and mobilize action, delivering a direct impact in our efforts in combating biodiversity loss and climate change at the very source of our food system. Please welcome Roozbeh Ravansari, founder and CEO of X-Centric Sciences from the USA, followed by Niccolo Calandri, CEO and founder of 3Bee from Italy.
Healthy soil is the foundation of productive sustainable agriculture, but modern intensive farming practices have degraded soil health and its carbon content thereby contributing to climate change. My name is Roozbeh. I'm co-founder and CEO of X-Centric. I recently completed my PhD in soil science and prior to that I was analyzing and assessing the safety of growing food. In urban agricultural soils, eccentric systems are born out of my experiences. Here globally, the soil testing market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of over 11% reaching 8.6 billion. By 2028, 40% of that growth is expected to occur in the Asia-Pacific region.
This growth is driven by efforts to both heal the planet and more efficiently use our limited resources to feed a growing population. The traditional method of solar carbon quantification is you obtain your sample, you ship it off to a lab, you process it, and then you analyze it using a big bulky machine that's expensive, inefficient, and doesn't generate the information you often need for soil management. Over the course of my research, I invented this sensor for soil carbon quantification. It will generate data on site in real time for farmers and agronomists, no postage necessary. I'm proud to say that some of the research was published in one of the top soil science journals in the world and it was voted editor's choice for the month in which it was published. In 30 seconds,
our patented tech will generate information for a large swath of the periodic table, including carbon, which no other solution can do. Farmers can expect to pay about $150 per sample for a full suite analysis. This is prohibitively expensive and causes low sampling frequencies and densities. It can also take weeks to get your results. Our solution fixes this. We are adopting a hardware enabled services business model where hardware sales generate one-off revenue and we also charge a subscription fee to interface with our software that provides actionable information for end users. End users include agronomists, farmers and carbon markets. Not only can we help farmers make more informed realtime data driven soil management decisions, but we're also increasing the feasibility of emerging agricultural carbon markets.
This is beneficial because it's a way to mitigate climate change to the tune of up to 5 billion metric tons per year, but there are many co-benefits as well. So for example, this can increase water quality, water retention, nutrient availability, nutrient release, and ultimately farmer yields. My co-founder and I have the technical experience to build eccentric systems and we're also proud to count some of the world's leading soil scientists as advisors, including Dr. Matthew Tighe,
who is an associate professor at the University of New England and editor in chief at one of the top soil science journals in the world, and also Dr. David Weindorf who is vice President Research Innovation at Central Michigan. In the face of climate change, not only do we need to do a better job using the limited resources that we have, but we also need to remove atmospheric carbon.
Our tech can help on both these fronts. We're currently raising 500,000 to help deploy more test pilots across Australia and Asia and we hope you will join us in making soil management more widely accessible to fight climate change and create carbon sinks. Thank you. I look forward to connecting.
Hi everyone. I am Niccolo Calandri, CEO of 3Bee, credit for biodiversity. The fastest growing market is the carbon market. Last year we traded more than 1000 billion of carbon credit but it is just a very small piece of the puzzle. In order to fight climate change,
we need to enhance and protect the biodiversity. Biodiversity means water quality, soil quality, air quality, and also carbon sequestration. That's why 3Bee is the first company which is able to measure biodiversity and to provide regenerative solutions in order to protect ecosystem.
We are a tech company. We design sensors and thanks to his sensor, we acquire data from the environment and mainly from the bees, from the pollinator. We correlate this data to the satellite vision and together we are able to provide a biodiversity index. Our solution is also used from farmers and beekeeper and together thanks to our network, we provide agri forestry and agrivoltaic solutions. So we are creating an offset in biodiversity.
We are mining credit of biodiversity. Our business model is to sell credit. We already sell credit to Ferrero for offsetting biodiversity credit for marketing campaign for Calzedonia credit for Toyota for ESG regulation and credit to Booking and JP Morgan for employee engagement. We have a huge competitor. The name is WWF, quite huge. And what is the difference? WWF is a consultancy company. It's not a company on .
We have a scalable service and solution and we are comparable to Indigo Agritech. Indigo is worth 1 billion today and is working in the carbon credit market. We are working the biodiversity market. We provide our solution in a B2B way, so we are working with more than 500 companies in our current way, but we as also a B2C channel.
We are already achieved more than 100,000 customers right now. We move from zero to 2 million recurring revenue in B2B in just two years and we are going to close 5 million revenue this year in total revenue. Our team is composed of 30 people who mainly are PhDs in data science, PhD in biology, PhD in electronics. I am from MIT. And together we already closed a Series A of 5 million and now we are looking to business partners in order to get revenue because it's better to get revenue than investors. Sorry for that. <laugh> In order to boost
our strategy in Asia. Thank you so much. As the global population grows and the demand for animal protein increases, it's putting pressure on the aquaculture and livestock farming industries to intensify to meet the increasing demand. Unfortunately, this intensification can carry harmful consequences for animal health, which has a direct impact on human nutrition and health.
Our next two founders are at the forefront of animal science. By improving the farming environment, their technological solutions can improve the health of the animals we consume and benefit the smallholder farmers whose economic survival would otherwise be at risk. Please welcome on stage Lam Nguyen, co-founder of Tepbac from Vietnam, followed by Alexandros Pantalis, co-founder and CEO of Phagos from France.
My name's Lam, co-founder of Tepbac from Vietnam and my co-founder and I grew up on shrimp farms. Our families have been farming shrimp for over 20 years and while our families are doing okay, many shrimp farmers remain very poor and cannot sustain their shrimp farms. This is why we started Tepbac to help shrimp farmers, starting in Vietnam first, then around the world.
Now shrimp farmers have three main problems. Firstly, they heavily depend on manual labor, a human. Secondly, they cause serious environmental pollution with their unsustainable shrimp farming practices. And third, they are struggling in farm management and buying input materials with product variety and cheap price and the aquaculture industry can only be sustainable when we find that solutions to these farmer problems and we plan to start by dominating our markets on Vietnam. First we see one of the top seafood market in the world and then expanding to other part of Asia to have farmers. We have developed a suite of technologies across the entire aquaculture supply chains which will reduce the risk, simplify farm operations, and save cost. Let me elaborate. Next
we get the farmer on Tepbac's platform with this product. This is the world's first automatic self cleaning water quality monitoring device. This device provides real time data on water quality to help the farmer or making important decisions during their farming process.
And there's no automation in aquacultural farm management without this device. And there's a clear product market fit as we tripled our customer within one years of launching this device. And we also started collaborating with top companies. We already have a full suite of hardware and software solutions we call Farmext. We have a farmer monitor their farm,
digitize data, and automate operations. And next we are expanding our e-commerce platform so that the farmer can have all inputs whenever and wherever and in the next two years we will be rolling out financial and insurance solutions and also building an aquaculture and shrimp market. Our strategy is to develop solutions for the entire shrimp ecosystem. We will help the farmers every step of the way and farmers are happy with our solutions. And they reduce costs by 20%, added 30% to their profits and gained an extra $8,000 US dollars per pond per year. Our revenue comes from application of IOT devices, eCommerce and shrimp markets and our revenue is about $2,700 USD per pond per year. Our team is young and experienced.
We have deep experience in aquaculture and have worked together for more than four years. For me and my co-founder of Tepbac, we have more than 20 years working in shrimp farms and we know everybody in the Vietnam aquaculture industry. Now we are raising 1 million US dollars to push the e-commerce platform with direct sales to enhance IOT devices, production and build model farms. This investment will help us to increase our revenue from $200K this year to one 1.8 million USD next year.
Thank you so much and I look forward to meeting you. Hi all. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you very much for your time. I'm Alexandros CEO of Phagos and I come with bad news. Bacteria are evolving resistant to antibiotics. They're now one of the biggest threats to global health as they're expected to kill more than cancer today by 2050. This year only the effect of resistant bacteria are estimated to generate one and a half trillion dollars in economic losses. But I also come with good news.
Nature has created a highly efficient bacteria hunter called bacteriophage. It is evolving by itself to maintain its efficiency against bacteria. Now bacteriophages are complex to manipulate so there's just a handful of companies in the world actually able to use them but they're currently using them as if they were antibiotics. A one size fits all static product bound to become obsolete in an ever evolving environment and we believe that's a waste. So we created Phagos and developed a proprietary iterative process enabling us to channel the evolutionary potential of bacteriophages, which basically means we can adapt our drugs to any target disease and eliminate it with the highest efficiency and at an incredible speed because to develop a new cure from scratch, we just need two months and once we got it we can just use it again. To maximize our impact we will start applying our technology to the biggest consumer of antibiotics in the world.
Animals consume 70% of all antibiotics. Resistant bacteria generate 300 billion in losses for the animal farming sector. Our solution already shows very promising results for the sector. We're able to increase their survivability of aquatic animals by 30% and to increase the weight gains of terrestrial animals by 40%. In both cases we effectively wiped out the target disease.
We're initially targeting the three big markets for animal farming and our current results indicate that we can increase productivity by up to 20% for chicken by up to 50% for shrimp and by up to 10% for dairy cattle generating billions of dollars in value to get there. We've put together an exceptional team of complementary experts an army of PhDs from a diversity of fields in phage biology to push current frontiers and we're complimenting this team with engineers and lab technicians to scale up and distribute at industrial level. We just raised two and a half million euros to do it and we're already moving forward with key agrifood and animal farming companies but we're looking to open our technology to more players in the region and we're also always open to discuss further investment rounds.
So if that might be of interest to you, I'd be very happy to chat. Thank you very much. Hello! Hi everyone. Hi, how's everyone doing? Isn't this great? For who is this their first demo day? Put your hand up if it's your first demo day. Oh well a few of you. Well it's brilliant so I hope you are enjoying it.
So I'm AgFunder's head of media and research and I run our news site AFN and I do our research reports as well. And my background is as a financial journalist I've been covering agriculture though for 10 years now, so I'm really showing my age, but that was about the same time that Rob and Michael set up AgFunder. So we go way back and let me tell you, this industry is so much more interesting than anything else I covered in finance. I was covering stuff like structured bonds medium term notes. Do you know what they are? I didn't really but I gave it a go <laugh>. So as soon as I got into this space I was instantly hooked and absolutely loving it and it's been such a journey. The sheer number of startups that we have today, the number of investors, it's a completely different place than it was 10 years ago.
So I'm gonna tell you a bit about the report that we just released on Tuesday for Asia Pacific and as you can see from that chart just there, it's been amazing. We had record breaking amounts of investment last year, 15.2 billion. I will caveat and say that half of that or nearly half went to China and within that how much was it? 5 billion of China's category went to E-Grocery itself and within that there was one company in China that raised 3 billion. So not to overstate the point, but we can take that out an outlier.
And then the amazing thing is that the rest of Asia Pacific raised 8 billion last year, so it was still record breaking besides that China piece and looking ahead to 2022 we actually have more great news. So even though the total numbers are coming down yet again, if we exclude China where we've seen quite a lot of failure in the grocery space, investment in the region is up 15% year on year. And if you think that this is the context of a bit of a downturn, I dunno if anyone anyones notice financial markets are a little bit spotty at the moment. So we are amazed that it's bucking that trend and it's up 15% year on year, which is so exciting. And another big data point for this time this part of the year is that India has overtaken China and is the biggest market for investment in Asia Pacific and we can't see that changing.
We think that India has a great ecosystem for food tech and ag tech and it's been around since back since we started in 2013. So if we dig into where people are investing across agrifoodtech those downstream categories do really dominate. So those include your e-grocery as I mentioned, restaurant marketplaces, retail and restaurant technologies, cloud retail infrastructure and it was dominated by countries like China. But even in places like Australia where it's an agricultural powerhouse of a country we saw a lot of downstream activity and there are a few reasons obviously in the context of covid, I don't need to tell you all why food delivery was important, but there are other areas such as restaurant technologies and retail technologies where it became a food safety for workers, a hygiene thing for food products bringing automation in was increasingly in demand as a result.
And there's been a big labor shortage across food and agriculture globally since Covid. So you are going to hear from a great startup later called LYRO, featured them in the report and they're doing automation in the supply chain where there's been major labor shortages too as a result of covid. But I just wanted to dig in a bit onto farm tech because this is sort of largely where a lot of it began really and it's just been a fantastic journey. If you can see the level of investment going into farm tech and this is something we do see globally as well, but it seems to be a bit more pronounced here in Asia Pacific. Even in China farm tech investing is on the rise.
There was about 600 million worth of investment in farm tech in China including ag, bio technologies robotics or a particular strength there. But overall in Asia Pacific and why I'm so excited about this segment being farm tech is that there's a lot of room for growth. So if you compare it to other parts of the world, the potential, I mean the tech penetration here is much lower than it is in places like the US and so there's a lot of room for growth there and affordability has been obvious issue here with smallholder farmers being the majority here. So
affordability and access to these tools, but once you start being able to get them on the farm, there's real excitement. And Mark from Omnivore shared with us on Tuesday that in India if you get a soil sensor it can become something really exciting for your community and a lot of your neighbors come around and look at it. And so this idea of getting technology on the farm is much more exciting. We hear in the US a lot of farmers are quite fatigued with yet another pharma software entrepreneur knocking on their door. So it's quite a different situation here. So that's a little snapshot for you all. You can dig into the report,
you can download it. I think I've got a QR code so you can download it there or you can sign up to our newsletter, agfundernews.com or go to agfunder.com. But yes, thank you all so much for coming and speak to you later.
We continue with our food resilience story. We are entangled and wrapped up in packaging. We're deeply interconnected with the materials we use not only to dress and clothe the food we eat, but to dress and clothe ourselves.
New materials have given us a lot of benefits over the years. However, we're also now more conscious of the issues of single use. Two of our founders are changing the plot of this narrative by bringing sustainability to the FMCG and fashion industries. Introducing Adi Reza, co-founder and CEO of MYCL from Indonesia.
And Mart Salumae, co-founder and CEO of Decomer from Estonia. Did you know that that hat, skirt, the handbag, sandals, sneakers, and this jacket is not leather? But it's better. The leather industry is expected to reach 75 billion US dollar in the next 12 months. But traditional leather production is very polluting, it's consuming a lot of water and making high CO2 emissions and consuming a lot of energy. So if you want to change fashion world to become more sustainable, we need to find alternative materials that are better for our people and planet. In MYCL,
we believe mushrooms can save fashion industry. Thanks. Always glad to have a co-founder that has model materials. <laugh>, I was an architect and my co-founder is biotech engineer. We spent 10 years developing ways to use natural resources and converting into sustainable product from mycelium, from our humble beginning selling gourmet mushrooms and to creating mushroom composite through replicating the strength of concrete and steel in building structure. In 2018,
we were asked if our technology could be applied as mycelium leather, like this jacket and sneakers. From our four patents and several trade secrets, our material is having better performance, abrasions, faster growth rate compared to animal leathers and cheaper to similar competitors. Somehow we can also create the looks and texture similar to leather without P or PPC for sure.
This technology being tested in Paris Fashion Week by LVMH prize-winning designers from Japan. We're glad recently we got more trust from six global brands named like Decathlon, Under Armour, and Camper, joining our paid pilot to launch capsule collections by next year. We're proud our first capsule collections with smaller brands are already hitting the stores in Japan so people can buy it now.
In total we have 10 million US dollar of sales contract or equal to half million square foot of mycelium leather and this has barely scratched the surface because global demand of vegan leather market is reaching 90 billion US dollar in 2025. We are proud that people love our product and order it, but our production facility is very small in a small village back in Indonesia. So by having more proper facility, better and efficient equipment, we can convince bigger agricultural waste producers to replicate the technology and become our replication partner. Recently we just closed our pre-Series A with names like prolific investors in fashion, agri and life sciences joining our cap table. We just launched our new fundraising round with total investment of 4 million US dollars and we are looking for investors that can help us to move to the next level. So there is no way we can continue consuming animal or fossil fuel materials to sustain our current lifestyles.
So I'm inviting you to join our vision. So to bring this exciting product to the market so people can save the environment from their closet. I'm Adi, CEO and co-founder of MYCL. Thank you.
Hello, I'm Mart, the CEO of Decomer Technology. Consumers today want more and more convenience, which is good as it makes people's lives easier. But on the other hand, we all know that convenience packaging causes huge environmental and health issues from climate change to waste and microplastics. So to really combat the devastating effect that single use food packaging creates for the environment, we have developed novel water soluble and edible packaging materials. Here I have a small piece of it that I'm going to eat now. Now there are already some water soluble materials out there, but they're mostly based on petroleum animal based ingredients or unscalable plant-based fee stock, which makes them unsustainable or expensive to produce.
On the other hand, we use a plant-based blend of mostly polysaccharides that are used in the food industry, are cheap and readily available. All our materials are completely plant based and edible and therefore they also degrade just like food does. Our standard materials are transparent, tasteless and waterless, but we can make them functional and that colors and flavors and we focus on fast ultra solvable materials. Some of the world's largest food and consumer goods producers have seen this value and they're interested in purchasing the material in roles or buying private level products. In fact,
they have been the ones reaching out to us as they feel the increasing consumer preference and regulatory pressure for sustainability. We have pilots going on for very different novel product categories and we focus on the food industry. We're working closely with several research centers and universities regarding IP. We have filed a patent, we have a holistic IP strategy and our patent attorney has managed the IP portfolios of corporations such as DuPont. We are a USC corporation registered in San Francisco, but at the moment our activities are based in Estonia, which is also where we have set up our food standard production facilities.
I'm a material scientist specialized in biopolymer materials and my co-founder Kelly has a background in business administration and technology management. The two of us have also been chosen to the Forbes 30 under 30 list. So far we have received $350,000 of investment plus governmental grants, which has enabled us to carry out R&D, protect our IP, set up our production facilities, and carry out development with huge global corporations.
We're currently raising $1 million to finish the pilots and to really unlock our potential to start with large scale sales to corporate partners. We're about to close a round so if you want to join our journey, I'd be happy to discuss further and we're always open to connections to potential clients, especially in the food industry. Thank you. To achieve sustainability in our food system, our intake of protein will need to come from a variety of sources. We're at an inflection point in alternative protein production, which is demanding that we find new ways to bring nutritious high protein ingredients and products that are both sustainably sourced and delightful to consumers. Bringing something unique to the table quite literally. I'd like to welcome Bola Adeyanju and Hakeem Jimo co-founders of Veggie Victory from Nigeria, followed by Jonathan Goshen, co-founder and CEO of Yeap from Israel to the stage to share more.
Good day everyone. My name is Bola and this is a Hakeem. We are the two cofounders of Veggie Victory, Nigeria's plant-based food company. We are revolutionizing plant-based meats in Africa. Africa's population is skyrocketing doubling in the next 20 years to 2.5 billion people. The demand for meat is going to increase by 300%.
Nine years ago we started Veggie Victory as a vegan restaurant showing people that there are other ways than more meat. Nigeria's love eating healthy, but they are always concerned about the quality of their meat. I'm a trained chef being born and bred in Nigeria. I understand our local taste and how our meats are being prepared.
So we created VChunks. Our customer love the bite and texture of VChunks. Nine out of our customer, out of 10 of our customers are meat eaters, but they cannot believe it's not meat. VChunks is very, very, very high in protein.
It's shelf stable and then is at price priority with beef. VChunks has 7 times less carbon footprint than beef. So the million dollar question, how big is Africa's protein market? The total meat market and that's our TAM, is worth 31 billion US dollar for Africa and 5 billion for Nigeria. The global average market share for meat substitutes is 1%. So that gives us a SAM of 300 million for Africa and 50 million for Nigeria.
The vast majority of our consumers who can see some of them there are actually eating meat however they want healthier food options, protein variety and that's what Veggie Victory does. Also, we are tackling the severe protein deficiency in Africa. Our business model is food manufacturing and product distribution. VChunks has a gross profit margin of over 40%.
Our growth model 10x is B2B supplying restaurants and food businesses. We are in 20 restaurants so far growing to 100 by next year. Product innovation. We just launched our vegan jerky and more to come and market expansion in Africa and the African Diaspora in America, Europe, and Asia. We are in 50 stores growing to 300 by next year already 20 people are working for Veggie Victory.
We need to grow our sales team being a first mover and a product category builder in an absolute pioneer market, huge market before the competition wakes up. We have a number of global investors who are pushing us for our Africa vision and have vast experience in FMCG. So we are looking for those special investors to reach our fundraising goal of 500,000 US dollars. We have secured a third that will boost our sales and distribution capacity as well as give us a runway of two years and help us complete our 1000 square meter fully owned factory that will have a capacity more than 200,000 packs per month. So you can help us bring healthier nutrition and affordable protein to Africa. Thank you and welcome to the future of Africa's Plant Based.
Thank you. Hello. Hello everyone. It's a well known fact that people today are looking for less process and more healthier food, right? And because of that we see a huge transition towards the usage of alternative protein. Current ingredient that can be found in the market are soy, pea, and animal protein. But what's the problem next to each one? You have a small asterisk, whether it's flavor, allergen, or they were unsustainably produced. That asterisks actually affects three verticals. Manufacturers don't have one good ingredient to work with.
Corporations are still looking for more alternatives and consumers simply don't buy. So at the bottom line, very small amount of the population are using or consuming those products while the potential is huge. And why so? Because current solutions seem to be too processed, too expensive, and lack of versatility and functionality. And that's exactly where Yeap comes in. Hello, my name is Jonathan Goshen and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Yeap. We produce protein out of yeast, but what is so special about the yeast that we are using, we are using yeast that otherwise were thrown away, not only the ones that are coming from breweries.
So how do we do that? We take the side stream and downstream of industrial processes and we run it into our process, converting them into concentrated protein powder, all of that without fermentation. And under patent that we already submitted, our first product to come to the market is functional concentrated protein, A protein that can replace the functionality of an egg, can replace the soy, and can replace some of the milk protein in various applications. So what is so special about our protein? We actually take the asterisks out of the equation and at the same time care a lot about the environment. Our protein is highly nutritious with a very high,
no allergen. It can allow the manufacturer to create a cream texture. It's scalable. It's easy to scale with a resilient supply chain. And at the end, sustainability, upcycled food and circular economy are not a slogan, but rather the real thing. We take the downstream converting it into functional protein. Starting started in September, 2020 with an idea only today. We already produce on a scale of hundred kilos per year and very soon on Q1 we will jump to the tonnes per day. Pilot and customer wise,
we are on the run with several pilots, one of them already converted into a customer. Our A team with accumulated tens of years of experience starting with Didier. Tobias one of the co-founder and chairman of the board. Chairman of the board through Donna, Dominik, Karen, and Bill on our advisory board. What we are after, we are at the moment fundraising a Safe start as part of Series A.
And at the same time we are looking for more potential customers in the field of dairy, condiment and snacks to run some pilot with. Want to hear more, want to give it a bite? We will be glad to meet you outside. Thank you very much. Our final chapter for this evening is about strengthening the supply chain. The fourth industrial revolution is unlocking new opportunities for people and technology to cooperate. For example, the emergence of on-farm robotics can help overcome challenges around labor shortages and food loss while driving increased productivity and efficiency. Please welcome Dr. Nicole Robinson,
CEO and co-founder of LYRO Robotics from Australia. Hi, I'm Dr. Nicole Robinson from LYRO Robotics. Our mission is to use robots to address labor shortages in the food supply chain. We address labor shortages by using intelligent robots to pick and pack different kinds of fruits and vegetables. Some examples include avocados, zucchinis, and sweet potatoes. LYRO
can meet the exact requirements of the customer and pack a huge variety of fruits and vegetables into a box based on six different criteria. For example, item counts and color. Labor shortages and food waste are a global problem. Over 650 million tons per year is lost on farm.
A root cause comes from on-farm labor shortages resulting in perfectly good food getting dumped. Simply put, there isn't enough labor to meet packing demand. The solution is a LYRO robotic packer. Our robot is ready to work around the clock. We use our robots as a service rental model to meet packing, demand, seasonality and throughput volume. We can install in less than an hour and use a rotating booking system to ensure at least 80% use during the calendar year.
In deploying for one month, we can save the customer up to 30% on their packing costs. Robotics in agriculture is becoming an absolute necessity to meet the demand of fresh fruits and vegetables in the world. The agricultural labor force is declining and robots provide an excellent opportunity to substitute farm labor. To showcase this, the global agricultural robotics market is estimated at 99 billion by 2030 with a growing rate at over 34% after a decade of robotic grasping research.
This product is now commercialized via LYRO Robotics when competing against some of the best in the world. Our solution won first place against research labs and multinational corporations such as MIT, Princeton, and Mitsubishi. Here is our current executive team of expert advisors with a strong diversity across business, technology, law, and agriculture. To meet customer demand of our product, we are raising a seed plus and later a Series A round. With this, we will exponentially increase the total number of robots at LYRO to get more robots into the field. This round will set us up for success and with a strong path to profitability. Thank you for your time.
We hope you'll join us on the journey of having robots pave the way of the future in agriculture. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that just about wraps up the pitching segment of today's demo day. I know we were just getting warmed up, but there's a lot more still to come. Please join me in giving our cohort enormous round of applause for such a fantastic job.
We hope you've been excited by the solutions shared on stage tonight. As together we write the next chapter in our global food story. But the conversation shouldn't end here. We truly hope that you feel inspired to carry on the conversation this evening about how we can build together a sustainable and resilient food system. As a reminder, you may scan this QR code to be connected with our founders and the GROW team will facilitate introductions for you. For those of you in the auditorium today,
we invite you to continue that conversation over refreshments in the foyer. Again, I would like to congratulate each of our founders for the hard work and dedication that you've put into tonight and bringing your story to the stage to share with us all. So well done. You're all amazing. And with that, we are on the lookout for our next incredible founders that can join our GROW Impact Accelerator Cohort 4 and join the GROW movement. If that's you or somebody that you know please head to our website and put your application in, we're excited to hear about your new and exciting technologies.
As Becca said, we've prepared some canapes for you. Some of you might even recognize a familiar taste from our alumni Green Rebel. Where we are today, the National Gallery, is a historic site. It has seen many defining moments in Singapore's history. So I thought it would be a nice context for you to continue the conversation. And who knows, maybe some defining relationships might be forged tonight.
Behind the three of us actually, there is a machine that has really brought tonight into fruition. So I'd just like to really thank our team for all the hard work they've done over the week and also for the incredible week this time. And now I'd like to take a group selfie. So if you're in the center, great stuff. But if you're on the side, maybe you wanna stand up and maybe scoot closer and then we'll take a group shot. Can we get house lights on please? Yes. Let's see everybody.
No event is complete without the obligatory selfie <laugh>. Maybe we can change the backdrop as well. Actually no, we don't even see it, right? Okay. Huddle around everyone. Best smile, 1, 2, 3. Woo. Woo, woo.
Five for insurance. Right. Well that's a wrap. Thank you everyone for joining us today.
It's been a great pleasure hosting you. Have a great evening. Let's keep the party going. Thank you. Thank you.
2022-11-12