The company raises funding from Openspace Ventures and SEEDS Capital of Enterprise Singapore

Singapore-based agtech company Nutrition Technologies announced today it has raised an undisclosed sum in Series A round from a host of investors, led by Openspace Ventures and Enterprise Singapore’s investment arm SEEDS Capital.

The proceedings from this round will go into establishing an insect protein production facility in Southeast Asia, which aims to produce over 18,000 tonnes of insect-based feed ingredients and organic fertilisers every year.  The new facility will incorporate Nutrition’s insect-rearing production system to manufacture Hi.Protein insectmeal, its flagship product. The goal is to market it as an economical and scalable alternative to competing for fishmeal products on the market.

A significant portion of the funding will also be used to continue its black soldier fly genetics and biology research.

Founded in 2014 by Nick Piggott & Tom Berry, Nutrition manufactures sustainable animal feed ingredients and organic compost, using a combination of special selected bacteria and black soldier fly larvae to recycle nutrients from agricultural and food processing by-products.

The whole project is supported under Startup SG Equity’s scheme for private-sector investment for startups through government equity co-investment.

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“The key to be successful in this sector is being able to produce a consistently high quality product at an affordable price for feed manufacturers without charging a sustainability premium,” said Nick Piggott, Co-founder and CEO of Nutrition. “We have achieved this by developing a unique combination of bio-processing steps, which enables us to optimise the nutrient uptake in our insect larvae.”

There’s been an increase in demand for livestock and seafood in recent years. However, the demand is not met by the global fishmeal supply for livestock feeding, causing a deficit in high-grade proteins. This has triggered Nutrition to turn to black soldier fly larvae as a sustainable protein alternative to fishmeal, a commonly used ingredient in animal feed.

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Hian Goh, Partner at Openspace Ventures, shared that the investment the VC made into Nutrition Technologies is also a part of its “OPENHAND” initiative to follow United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment leveraging environmental, social, and governance factors in the agri-food tech space to feed the world.

Moving forward, SEEDS Capital and Enterprise Singapore are to continue to work with Nutrition Technologies to connect with industry partners in aquaculture and alternative protein innovation.

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Photo by Antonio Grosz on Unsplash

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