Startup says the seaweed blobbing toward Florida has a silver lining

A brown macroalgae native to the Atlantic’s Sargasso Sea is increasingly a menace to coastal ecosystems and communities across the Gulf of Mexico, ever since mats of the normally beneficial seaweed (known as sargassum) exploded in numbers in 2011. This is the backdrop for Carbonwave, which recently raised $5 million to put the hulking algae blooms to good use.

Researchers say farm and sewage runoff is likely driving the now 5,000-mile-wide “Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt.” Climate change may also be playing a role.

There’s no need to run screaming from sargassum, despite the tone of some stories covering the Florida-bound blooms. Still, they pose a threat to coral reefs and tourism-dependent livelihoods alike. When the stuff piles up on beaches, it rots, emitting skunky hydrogen sulfide. 

The recent sargassum surges are forcing folks to find creative ways to get rid of it, and already, possible applications run the gamut. Researchers and entrepreneurs aim to turn it into syrup, bricks and even jet fuel. As for Carbonwave, the Boston- and Puerto Rico–based startup is using it in fertilizer, cosmetics and even faux leather.

Backed by ESG-themed investment firms Natixis and Viridios Capital, as well as ocean-focused VC Katapult, Carbonwave says the new cash will help it scale production of its seaweed-based emulsifier for cosmetics. The startup said in a statement that it “has already sold half a ton” of its emulsifier, which it created as an alternative to petroleum-based ingredients. The company also claimed that its sargassum fertilizer “reduces the need of” climate change-driving nitrogen fertilizer.

CEO Geoff Chapin said Carbonwave makes these products through a “proprietary extraction process,” which involves pressing the seaweed and removing the arsenic. The process yields a liquid fertilizer, while the leftover pulp forms the basis for the emulsifier and fake leather. The way Chapin tells it, the company uses “almost every part of the seaweed to make these products.”

Carbonwave is part of a wave of startups vying to turn algae into environmentally friendlier products. For starters, there’s H&M-backed Algiknit (now Keel Labs), which creates textiles; a slew of bioplastics companies, including Loliware and ULUU; and a firm called Umaro, which makes sea-bacon. Seaweed startups often focus on commercializing kelp in one way or another, but a few (like Carbonwave and Seaweed Generation) focus on sargassum.

“We need to put it to good use before it creates more ecological and climate harm,” Carbonwave told TechCrunch. 

The startup added that it may up its $5 million Series A with additional funding later on. It has secured at least $12 million to date.

Startup says the seaweed blobbing toward Florida has a silver lining by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch

Three-Parent Baby Technique Could Create Babies At Risk of Severe Disease

MIT Technology Review has revealed two cases in which babies conceived with the three-parent baby technique have shown what scientists call "reversion." "In both cases, the proportion of mitochondrial genes from the child's mother has increased over time, from less than 1% in both embyros to around 50% in one baby and 72% in another," they report. From the report: When the first baby born using a controversial procedure that meant he had three genetic parents was born back in 2016, it made headlines. The baby boy inherited most of his DNA from his mother and father, but he also had a tiny amount from a third person. The idea was to avoid having the baby inherit a fatal illness. His mother carried genes for a disease in her mitochondria. Swapping these with genes from a donor -- a third genetic parent -- could prevent the baby from developing it. The strategy seemed to work. Now clinics in other countries, including the UK, Greece, and Ukraine, are offering the same treatment. It was made legal in Australia last year. But it might not always be successful. [...] Fortunately, both babies were born to parents without genes for mitochondrial disease; they were using the technique to treat infertility. But the scientists behind the work believe that around one in five babies born using the three-parent technique could eventually inherit high levels of their mothers' mitochondrial genes. For babies born to people with disease-causing mutations, this could spell disaster -- leaving them with devastating and potentially fatal illness. The findings are making some clinics reconsider the use of the technology for mitochondrial diseases, at least until they understand why reversion is happening. "These mitochondrial diseases have devastating consequences," says Bjorn Heindryckx at Ghent University in Belgium, who has been exploring the treatment for years. "We should not continue with this." "It's dangerous to offer this procedure [for mitochondrial diseases]," says Pavlo Mazur, an embryologist based in Kyiv, Ukraine, who has seen one of these cases firsthand.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US Regulators Rejected Neuralink's Bid To Test Brain Chips In Humans, Citing Safety Risks

According to Reuters, Elon Musk's medical device company, Neuralink, was denied permission last year to begin human trials of a revolutionary brain implant to treat intractable conditions such as paralysis and blindness. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) outlined dozens of issues the company must address before human testing can begin, according to seven current and former employees. From the report: The agency's major safety concerns involved the device's lithium battery; the potential for the implant's tiny wires to migrate to other areas of the brain; and questions over whether and how the device can be removed without damaging brain tissue, the employees said. A year after the rejection, Neuralink is still working through the agency's concerns. Three staffers said they were skeptical the company could quickly resolve the issues -- despite Musk's latest prediction at a Nov. 30 presentation that the company would secure FDA human-trial approval this spring. Neuralink has not disclosed details of its trial application, the FDA's rejection or the extent of the agency's concerns. As a private company, it is not required to disclose such regulatory interactions to investors. During the hours-long November presentation, Musk said the company had submitted "most of our paperwork" to the agency, without specifying any formal application, and Neuralink officials acknowledged the FDA had asked safety questions in what they characterized as an ongoing conversation. Such FDA rejections do not mean a company will ultimately fail to gain the agency's human-testing approval. But the agency's pushback signals substantial concerns, according to more than a dozen experts in FDA device-approval processes. The rejection also raises the stakes and the difficulty of the company's subsequent requests for trial approval, the experts said. The FDA says it has approved about two-thirds of all human-trial applications for devices on the first attempt over the past three years. That total rose to 85% of all requests after a second review. But firms often give up after three attempts to resolve FDA concerns rather than invest more time and money in expensive research, several of the experts said. Companies that do secure human-testing approval typically conduct at least two rounds of trials before applying for FDA approval to commercially market a device.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Virologist Disputes WSJ Report on a Minority Opinion Suggesting Covid 'Lab Leak' Origin

Three long-time Slashdot readers all submitted this story — schwit1, sinij, and DevNull127. DevNull127 writes: Four U.S. agencies have concluded that the Covid-19 virus originated at the Wuhan market, the Wall Street Journal reports. The U.S. National Intelligence Council reached the same conclusion. Then there's two more agencies (including America's CIA) that are "undecided." But there is one agency that decided — with "low confidence" — that the virus had somehow leaked from a lab. (And the FBI also decided with "moderate confidence" on that same theory.) "The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic's origin," writes the Wall Street Journal — adding that unfortunately U.S. officials "declined" to give any details on what led to the Energy Department's position. The Wall Street Journal also notes: Despite the agencies' differing analyses, the update reaffirmed an existing consensus between them that Covid-19 wasn't the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program, the people who have read the classified report said.... Some scientists argue that the virus probably emerged naturally and leapt from an animal to a human, the same pathway for outbreaks of previously unknown pathogens. Intelligence analysts who have supported that view give weight to "the precedent of past novel infectious disease outbreaks having zoonotic origins," the flourishing trade in a diverse set of animals that are susceptible to such infections, and their conclusion that Chinese officials didn't have foreknowledge of the virus, the 2021 report said. Also responding to the Department of Energy's outlying position was a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at Canada's University of Saskatchewan, who posted a series of observations on Twitter: The available evidence shows overwhelmingly that the pandemic started at Huanan market via zoonosis. I have no idea what this evidence that Department of Energy has is. All I know that it is "weak" and resulted in a conclusion of "low confidence". It reportedly comes from the DOE's own network of national labs rather than through spying. But I do know that to be consistent with the available scientific evidence, the DOE has to explain how the virus emerged twice over 2 wks in humans at the same market the size of a tennis court, over 8 km & across a river from the only lab in Wuhan working on SARSr-CoVs.... Claims of a progenitor at WIV are pure speculation & unsupported by evidence.... Despite 3 years of a global search for this evidence, it has not materialized, while evidence supporting zoonosis associated with Huanan has continued to stack up. At some point, an absence of evidence might just be evidence of absence.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Idaho lawmakers want to criminalize mRNA vaccines. Here's what happens if their bill passes

Anti-vax Republicans lawmakers are taking a page from abortion bans — and public health experts are worried

Discovery of 'Bond Villain' DNA Could Be a 'Gamechanger' for Cancer Treament

The Guardian reports: Scientists have pinpointed pieces of DNA which, they say, act like Bond villains in the way they help cancers spread. These microscopic agents have also been shown to be responsible for helping tumours gain resistance to anti-cancer drugs. The discovery of these bits of genetic material — known as extrachromosomal DNA or ecDNA — could revolutionise the treatments of some of the most aggressive tumours that affect people today, add the researchers.... Made up of tiny loops of DNA, these genetic villains survive outside the chromosomes which are our cells' main repositories of genetic material.... "We have found that ecDNA act as cancer-causing genes that have somehow separated themselves from a person's chromosomes and have started to behave in ways that circumvent the normal rules of genetics," said Stanford university geneticist Howard Chang. "They behave like villains in a Bond film. At first, in a film, you see different explosions, killings and disasters occurring and you don't know why they are happening or who is responsible. Then, at some point, you finally meet the villain who is revealed to be the agent of all this mayhem." They also seem to resemble the Bond henchman who re-appears at the end of the movie. Professor Paul Mischel of California's Stanford University says that when treating the most aggressive cancers, "The vulnerable gene had quickly disappeared when threatened by cancer drugs and was hidden in ecDNA. Then it reappeared once it was safe for it to start causing damage again." Mischel calls the discovery "a gamechanger," identifying the culprit "responsible for a large number of the more advanced, most serious cancers affecting people today. If we can block their activities, we can block the spread of these cancers." And that hope was echoed by Dr Mariam Jamal-Hanjani of University College London Cancer Institute "The crucial point is that once we have found the cause of the problem then it becomes possible to develop and try out all sorts of drugs and therapies to tackle that." * "The discovery of how these bits of DNA behave inside our bodies is a gamechanger," said Professor Paul Mischel of California's Stanford university, one of the leaders of the programme. "We believe they are responsible for a large number of the more advanced, most serious cancers affecting people today. If we can block their activities, we can block the spread of these cancers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

VivaCity raises at $42M valuation to make US cities safer, starting with New York

Around 39,000 people were killed in motor vehicle incidents in the USA in 2020 — and 6,200 of those deaths were pedestrians. Needless to say, those deaths aren’t just statistics: each has a ripple effect on families, loved ones and the wider communities. Viva is looking to tackle transportation impacts after raising $8.5 million in funding to expand its transport data collection into North America, with the long-term hope to reduce the number of injuries and make traffic safer overall. 

Viva (or VivaCity as it is known in the U.K.) is already well-established in Australia and the U.K. and is now bringing its artificial intelligence sensors to New York City. It will work with the New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DoT) on a new safety data analysis project. Viva’s sensors gather anonymized data showing how different street users move (or don’t) through the city. They can monitor how many vehicles or people are traveling in which direction, where and when congestion occurs and even detect “near misses” between vehicles or vehicles and pedestrians.

This wealth of anonymized data is intended to assist NYC DoT in making strategic decisions that help people move from A to B more efficiently, more sustainably and more safely. The theory is that if you can predict where accidents are likely to occur, taking action to prevent them beats waiting for one — or more — to happen before trying to do something about it. 

“There is a critical need for technology that adapts to the changing mobility landscape. Reactive decision-making is not fit for purpose and it is costing lives. To change, we need to have data to better understand how people are using the roads,” Viva’s CEO Mark Nicholson explains. “This helps authorities to redirect their billions of annual infrastructure investment into the right places.”

“The main driver for both myself and my co-founders is to tackle climate change. It’s the sad truth that globally, transport is the most stubborn when it comes to emissions — even with electric vehicles coming in,” says Nicholson. In a nutshell, poor transport infrastructure is a people-killer in more ways than one. “Making our streets safer means more people can go places on foot or by two-wheeled pedal-power. Good for people, good for the planet.” 

“I’m excited to see the impact this will have on road safety, particularly for vulnerable road users like cyclists. The perception that the roads are dangerous is the No. 1 reason that people don’t cycle more, so anything we can do to change that will have a huge climate impact,” says Nicholson.

Nicholson and his co-founders met at university in 2011, when they raised half a million dollars to build an experimental car that was 50x more efficient than standard road vehicles. Bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, they founded Viva in 2015, looking to improve road safety and fight climate collapse.

Since its foundation, Viva has deployed more than 3,500 sensors in seven countries. These sensors can detect nine different modes of transport and have accumulated an impressive 20 billion road user counts. Its latest funding aims to help it grow further.

Viva’s latest funding is led by sustainable infrastructure VC investor EnBW New Ventures (ENV), sustainability-led alternative assets and SME investment manager Foresight Group and Gresham House Ventures, the growth equity arm of specialist alternative asset manager Gresham House. Using this fundraising, Viva says it is focused on continued growth, with two particular goals: 

First is its internal expansion, of which the New York City collaboration is a part. “We’re already present in over 100 U.K. cities and have worked with authorities in Australia and around Europe to better understand their roads,” says Nicholson. “With our sensors installed in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, NYC DoT are now analyzing this data to prioritize projects for the areas most in need of safety and other improvements.”

The second goal is to expand the Viva product line.  “Our vision is for road transport infrastructure to become data-driven, including real-time systems like traffic signals. The new product portfolio has targeted products that address the three major challenges the industry faces: road safety, sustainable transport and network optimization to beat congestion,” Nicholson concludes. 

Nicholson is in no doubt of how valuable the data collected by Viva can be to creating livable cities. “If we look back 10-20 years, other industries have been revolutionized by data, including advertising, marketing and retail. These industries are now radically different because of data that has gone into their ecosystems.”

The collation of large-scale anonymized data will allow for the analysis of how a city’s roads function: how and when people move about, and where the bottlenecks and blackspots are. Ultimately, this can lead to safer streets and livable cities where citizens aren’t afraid to engage with active travel. 

You might have noticed how there’s an emphasis on “anonymized data” here — the company tells TechCrunch that privacy-by-design is fundamental to the company, and it claims that maintaining the security and confidentiality of people’s data is critical to the company’s success.

“I believe strongly that the future of the Smart City has to be citizen-centric,” says Nicholson. “As such, we have designed our solutions from the ground up to guarantee the privacy of every citizen. The system was developed using data protection-by-design principles and is fully compliant with GDPR.”

VivaCity raises at $42M valuation to make US cities safer, starting with New York by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

From shipping container to table: Adapt brings urban mushroom farms to US

Canadian vertical farming startup Adapt AgTech is partnering with Reef Technology to bring its mushroom-growing shipping containers to major cities across the United States, starting with Austin.

Reef transforms urban real estate like parking lots into mobility and logistical hubs and currently operates over 8,000 locations across hundreds of cities. The partnership will help Adapt place its shipping containers steps away from such customers as restaurants and grocery stores, without having to pay the astronomical rent of a commercial or industrial space in a downtown area.

Adapt opened its first shipping container in Austin and began deliveries to restaurants this week. Over the course of the next few years, the startup plans to expand to over 50 locations, including Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and Miami.

“Our model is to create hyper-local farms in densely populated urban areas to reduce the distance from farm to fork,” Jonathan Murray, Adapt AgTech’s CEO and founder, told TechCrunch.

Adapt’s network of shipping container farms specializes in “aberrant gourmet mushrooms,” which are gourmet mushrooms that haven’t been available in North American retail until very recently. Think pink, yellow, blue and king oysters, chestnut mushrooms, and the trending lion’s mane.

“Mushrooms cater very, very well to container farming versus other crops like leafy greens because of the energy consumption,” continued Murray. “They don’t require a tremendous amount of light. It’s really just temperature and humidity.”

Adapt, which launched in February 2022, delivered its first farm in June last year to a location in Toronto. The company has been growing ever since and now has farms in Ottawa, Vancouver, Halifax, Kingston and Austin. On February 17, Adapt says it will launch a partnership with Loblaws — Canada’s largest retailer — starting with two flagship stores in downtown Toronto, and then dozens more in Toronto and Ottawa before expanding elsewhere over the following months.

Adapt will also roll out with retail banners under Canadian grocery chains Sobeys and Pattison Food Group in 2023.

“By the end of 2023 we’ll be available in stores of at least three of the top five largest retailers in Canada from Halifax to Vancouver and in between, which combined represent over 3,500 stores,” said Murray.

Adapt recently closed a seed round with climate VC Congruent, and it will use the funds to expand its base and hire more support.

Sustainable fruiting, cheaper mushrooms

Adapt AgTech designs and manufactures its shipping containers in Delta, British Columbia. Aside from the five containers operating today, Adapt recently started production on 16 more units and is aiming to deploy over 25 units over the next 12 months. Some of Adapt’s shipping containers are solar-powered with backup plugs, but for the purposes of a speedy U.S. launch, the startup will plug its shipping containers into the grid. The energy consumption, Murray said, is low — about 10 kilowatt hours per day.

The company’s distribution model is akin to a hub and spoke. Adapt uses a centralized hub in Kingston, Ontario, to do all of the lab work and colonize the substrate blocks — meaning it allows the mycelium, the root structure of the fungus, to grow on blocks of sawdust, spent coffee grounds or coconut coir. The startup then sends out the blocks to shipping containers, where the mushrooms can fruit close to customers. Murray says this allows Adapt to deliver mushrooms within a couple of hours of harvest, which not only means fresher fungi, but also longer-lasting mushrooms and reduced spoilage.

The startup deploys and operates the containers and also fulfills orders. An operator oversees everything from harvesting to managing orders to delivering mushrooms.

“All of our containers are currently operating essentially on one full-time farmer, so we’re enabling them to become what we like to call ‘farmtrepreneurs,'” said Murray. “So uncapped commissions, grow your territory as big as you can. We’ll add containers, we’ll grow your territories. This allows us to bring new and young people into farming as well, which is exciting.”

Murray also noted that existing mushroom farm operators have reached out to Adapt to flip their at-home businesses into Adapt farms.

The whole process allows the startup to stay vertically integrated, and thus save money on materials like substrate, which Adapt makes itself out of whatever is locally available. Adapt’s control over each farm also lets the company keep tabs on well-fruiting mushroom strains and propagate more of them, delivering even healthier margins to the company and a high-quality product that’s cheaper than what you’d get at the farmer’s market, said Murray.

From shipping container to table: Adapt brings urban mushroom farms to US by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

'De-Extinction' Company Will Try To Bring Back the Dodo

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Genetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences said Tuesday that it will try to resurrect the extinct dodo bird, and it's received $150 million in new funding to support its "de-extinction" activities. The dodo was already part of Colossal's plans by September 2022, but now the company has announced it with all the pomp, circumstance, and seed funding that suggests it will actually go after that goal. The $150 million, the company's second round of funding, was led by several venture capital firms, including United States Innovative Technology Fund and In-Q-Tel, a VC firm funded by the CIA that first put money into the company in September. Adding the dodo to its official docket brings Colossal's total de-extinction targets to three: the woolly mammoth (the company's first target species, announced in September 2021), and the thylacine, a.k.a. the Tasmanian tiger, the largest carnivorous marsupial. Adding the dodo to its official docket brings Colossal's total de-extinction targets to three: the woolly mammoth (the company's first target species, announced in September 2021), and the thylacine, a.k.a. the Tasmanian tiger, the largest carnivorous marsupial. Colossal's stated goal is not to simply bring these creatures back for vibes; its contention is that reintroducing the species to their respective habitats would help restore a certain amount of normalcy to those environments. Mammoths died out about 4,000 years ago on Wrangel Island, off the northeastern coast of Russia. The dodo, a species of flightless bird native to the island of Mauritius, was gone by 1681. The last known thylacine died at a zoo in Tasmania in 1936. Scientists have sequenced the genomes of all three species -- the mammoth's in 2015, the dodo's in 2016, and the thylacine's in 2018. The latter species were driven to extinction by humankind; humans hunted the dodo, introduced predators and pests to its environment, and contributed to its habitat loss. Humans may have played a role in mammoth extinction as well, but the dodo and the thylacine are classic examples of our ability to wipe out species at extraordinary speed. [...] If the company's work pans out -- and that's a big if -- proxy species of those extinct animals will be brought to bear. That's because the genetically engineered animals produced by Colossal would not be a bonafide mammoth, dodo, or thylacine. In 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Species Survival Commission published a report (PDF) denoting ground rules for creating proxy species. "Proxy is used here to mean a substitute that would represent in some sense (e.g. phenotypically, behaviorally, ecologically) another entity -- the extinct form," the commission stated, adding that "Proxy is preferred to facsimile, which implies creation of an exact copy." De-extinction is something of a misnomer, as this process, if successful, will yield science's best analogue for an extinct creature, not the creature itself as it existed in the past. De-extinction methods generally rely on using a living creature's genetics in the resurrection process. That means any 21st-century mammoth will have at least some modern elephant DNA imbued in it, and any nascent thylacine would be produced from the genome and egg of a related species.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Danish startup Kanpla wants to help canteens cut food waste

As much as 40% of all food produced each year goes nowhere near a human mouth, resulting in economic, environmental and social costs of an estimated $2.6 trillion.

While there are a multitude of social, cultural and even technological reasons for these staggering statistics, we’ve seen a slew of startups emerge with propositions on how to solve the food-waste problem. Last year, Choco hit the much-coveted unicorn status for software that digitizes the ordering, supply chain and communications processes for suppliers and restaurants. Elsewhere, there are companies serving AI-powered forecasting smarts to help retailers optimize their stock replenishment, while others have built marketplaces for selling surplus or imperfect produce. There’s even a company setting out to transform food waste into food containers.

Another fledgling startup called Kanpla, meanwhile, is focusing its efforts on cutting food waste in one very specific vertical: canteens.

Founded out of Denmark in 2019, Kanpla initially targeted school canteens, serving up software for parents to preorder food for their kids (children under the age of 13 are not allowed a debit card in Denmark), which gave schools a good idea of how much and what kinds of food to prepare. Today, the company targets all manner of canteens, with paying customers including shipping giant Maersk and Danish brewer Carlsberg, as well as industrial canteen providers such as Coor and Cheval Blanc, which serve more than 230 canteens across the Nordics.

In 2022, Kanpla said that its software was used in some 1,500 canteens, and it expects to triple that number this year as it expands into more European markets. In preparation for this growth, the company today announced it has raised €2.2 million ($2.4 million) in a seed round of funding.

How it works

There are two core elements to the Kanpla platform. For kitchens, Kanpla offers what it calls an “operating system” for managing their whole canteen from a PC or mobile device, including creating digital menus, support for different payment types, collecting and presenting sales data, and more. Through this, companies can understand which food sells best, allowing them to stock up on the right kinds of ingredients thereby minimizing produce that might otherwise go to waste.

On the “diner” side, users can access a mobile or web app for perusing menus and ordering food, meaning that their food can be waiting for them when they arrive in the canteen.

On top of that, the Kanpla platform has features specifically for addressing food waste.

For example, it enables kitchens and canteens to sell surplus food from their lunch or buffet menus as takeaways to guests. Through the admin dashboard, they simply list the amount of food available and the price, and a communication is sent to each Kanpla diner’s app.

And Kanpla also has a food-waste registration feature, currently in beta, which brings together data such as the number of people entering a canteen and the amount of food that’s wasted across categories (e.g. in production or uneaten buffet food). This requires kitchens to weigh the food before they throw it out.

Canteens only

Perhaps the most curious aspect of Kanpla’s offering is that it’s so narrowly focused on canteens, something that Kanpla CEO and co-founder Peter Bæch said was simply due to his own experiences.

“The idea to target the canteen industry came from our experience at our local canteens,” Bæch explained to TechCrunch. “We saw firsthand a canteen which threw out huge amounts of food at the end of the day. We thought about how we spent half of our lunch-break waiting in lines. These inconveniences led us to dive into the pains, finding an industry that was heavily behind on digitalization, with additional problems of forecasting, limited tools to manage guest relations and a high degree of manual work for print and billing. These insights became the beginning of our journey to digitalize this industry.”

While canteens undoubtedly share many of the pain points of other eating establishments, each come with their own unique problems and opportunities that require a different approach from a technology standpoint.

“Canteens differentiate from cafes and restaurants by having recurring guests, coming back day after day, giving them a unique potential to connect with their guests” Bæch continued. “Additionally, they have the added complexity and issues due to menus switching daily, and payments working often through hybrid approaches that may include card, invoice and salary deduction.”

Kanpla’s seed round was led by Netherlands-based VC HenQ, with participation from a handful of angel investors. The company said it will use its fresh cash injection to expand beyond its native Denmark and into the U.K., Norway and the Netherlands in 2023, with plans to extend its reach into the U.S. and other European markets the following year.

Denmark has spawned a number of sizeable tech companies through the years, such as expense management software provider Pleo, which hit a $4.7 billion valuation a year ago, while local neobank Lunar achieved a valuation north of $2 billion last year. And then there is, of course, Zendesk, which was bought out by a private equity firm for $10 billion back in June.

HenQ partner Jan Andriessen reckons that Kanpla can blaze a similar trail to Zendesk by cashing in on what initially seems like a niche vertical.

“At first, the canteen industry can seem obscure, but it’s a big market with huge potential,” Andriessen said in a statement. “Many B2B software products have blossomed in seemingly non-obvious markets. Zendesk, one of Denmark’s greatest tech businesses, was founded well before customer success software became a well-defined term. Kanpla can be the same, and that’s what makes them the type of B2B business we’re excited to support.”

Danish startup Kanpla wants to help canteens cut food waste by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch