Keen Venture Partners

🇬🇧 Exciting news from the UK with a brand new regulatory sandbox for cultivated foods. The UK government announced today that it’s creating Europe’s first regulatory sandbox for cultivated proteins and foods to improve the Food Standards Agency’s knowledge in this area. This initiative comes with £1.6 million in public funding. GOURMEY is proud to be one of the few pioneering cultivated protein companies to have requested market authorisation in the UK. We’re excited to keep working with the Food Standards Agency and Food Standards Scotland to bring our products to the UK culinary scene and to our partners in the near future. Alongside the funding, the FSA announced that it is moving forward with establishing a framework for international collaboration. This initiative would allow the UK to approve cultivated meat products that have already been authorized in other countries. We are delighted to see the UK pioneering this sandbox for cultivated foods and recognizing the potential of this innovation. It’s an exciting development for our industry, as it will help both innovators and the FSA work together toward advancing the market entry of these products while maintaining the highest safety standards. Thank you to The Times for featuring us in your coverage of this exciting update. Read more in The Times: https://lnkd.in/eRCz6u8x Read more in The Financial Times: https://lnkd.in/e3GRYYsz Also, we have exciting openings: join.gourmey.com

Pivotal milestone for GOURMEY and the cultivated foods ecosystem. We’re thrilled to announce that over the past few months, GOURMEY has requested market approval in five regions, filing applications with the US FDA, Singapore Food Agency, UK Food Standards Agency, Swiss Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office FSVO, and the European Commission. This achievement makes us the very first cultivated food company to file for approval in the EU. Complying with the rigorous standards of these world’s most advanced agencies on cultivated foods regulation, including the EU’s stringent novel food framework, is a testament to GOURMEY’s technology leadership, our commitment to safety, and the immense dedication of our team. We want to celebrate a massive team effort from all Gourmates, involving relentless work over the past few years to build a safe, resource-efficient, and commercially viable solution. We’ll first empower our culinary partners with our flagship cultivated duck product, offering a new choice for foie gras enthusiasts, chefs, and restaurants worldwide, followed by further sustainable and delicious foods as we continue to scale up. As Europe aims to boost food security and achieve sustainability goals, we are convinced that cultivated foods have strong potential to complement existing agrifood value chains, enhancing the long-term resilience of our food system. We look forward to continuing our close collaboration with regulatory authorities to introduce our products to the market. Special mention to the leadership of our Regulatory & Food Safety team: Hannah Lester, Brian Chun, Nadine Bongaerts-Duportet, Ph.D., and Victor SAYOUS. We are deeply thankful for all our partners, advisors, investors, and supporters. Thank you for being part of our journey—much more to come! Read more in POLITICO: https://lnkd.in/ejJUH_DW 👉 See our current openings: join.gourmey.com

In the next couple of months, we are going to make the life of thousands of local restaurants in Germany better! And that starts with a small milestone today: We are thrilled to announce our over-subscribed $5m Seed Round led by 20VC, with the participation from Keen Venture Partners, NL Startup Fund, 20Growth and 20Product. We are also extremely proud of the Business Angels that have shown strong conviction in allO: Daniel Khachab (Founder of Choco) Claire Hughes Johnson (COO of Stripe) Mario Götze (Professional Athlete & Business Angel) Dr. Martin Enderle (Chairman of Delivery Hero) Navid Hadzaad (Founder of Zapp) Patrick Cummins(Captain of Australian Cricket Team) Igor Tikhturov & Oleg Tikhturov (Founder of TrueSight Ventures) Ernst Ludes, PhD - CVCapital Michael Herbst ...and more 💪 We are grateful to all of our restaurants and partners, who made everything possible for us. And we are excited to bring our frontier restaurant system into every local restaurant. #restauranttech #gastrotech #startup #germanstartup #fundraising #vc

So, so happy to be able to announce Feather's Series A raise. There are many reasons to not invest in consumer insurtech and most investors we spoke to told us so. Sadly, there were many more reasons to invest in Rob, Vincent and the rest of the team ❤️ Their understanding of insurance at an atomic level, building Feather sustainably, and serving customers with a beautifully honest and transparent product are just a few reasons. Happy to be backing their mission at Keen Venture Partners along with Plural and Entrepreneur First. 🗞 https://lnkd.in/evnXma-e CC: Alexander Ribbink & Taavet Hinrikus