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It’s estimated that about a third of all food produced worldwide every year, which is approximately 1.3 billion tons, is estimated to be wasted. Aravita, a Brazilian artificial intelligence startup, thinks that supermarkets are the best place to start fixing this problem.
Marco Perlman, co-founder and CEO, started the company with Aline Azevedo and Bruno Schrappe in 2022 to tackle waste in the fourth-largest food producing country in the world where 33 million Brazilians have some type of food insecurity.
Aravita is developing an AI-powered solution for supermarkets that looks at variables, including climate, seasonality, consumer behavior and economic scenario, to manage the purchasing of fresh food — mainly fruits and vegetables — to reduce the instances of surplus items and lost sales due to waste. At the same time, the software increases the availability of items in demand.
“Supermarkets are our target audience because they are a great place to drive the first wedge of data availability,” Perlman told TechCrunch. “They have point-of-sale consumer data, and this is the data that we need to start making the predictions for low-demand forecasting. Unlike other parts of the supply chain, where the data is much harder to get a hold of, eventually we think that this will be digitized.”
Aravita is still in the very early stages: It has a conceptual prototype and started a pilot with a mid-sized supermarket chain near São Paulo and has the first set of algorithms developed. It is also in the process of integrating the first database of historical data into that model.
However, that first pilot didn’t come easy. Perlman recalls that potential customers were initially worried that startups were “having difficulty raising money, hiring and surviving,” and were uncomfortable giving store data to a company without financial resources that could stick around.
Aravita co-founders, Marco Perlman, Aline Azevedo and Bruno Schrappe. Image Credits: Aravita
So the trio started reaching out to investors and was able to secure a $2.5 million investment earlier this year, co-led by Qualcomm Ventures and 17Sigma.
“Fresh food management is highly fragmented and complex,” said Michel Glezer, director of Qualcomm Wireless GmbH and director at Qualcomm Ventures, in a written statement. “Aravita’s solution enables retailers to optimize inventory management, helping increase efficiencies and reduce waste.”
Joining those two firms were Bridge, DGF Investimentos, Alexia Ventures, BigBets, Norte Capital and a group of angel investors, including ClearSale partner and CEO Bernardo Lustosa and Flávio Jansen, former CEO of LocaWeb and Submarino.
Aravita is now in good company among other startups tackling food waste that also recently attracted venture capital, including Divert, which is trying to stop food before it reaches landfills; Diferente, also in Brazil, that is finding places for imperfect produce; and food resale app Recelery. They join other companies like Shelf Engine, Apeel, OLIO, Imperfect Foods, Mori and Phood Solutions.
The next steps are to develop the solution over the next few months and add a second pilot customer, Perlman said. He expects to have product-market fit next year and the ability to “step on the gas to accelerate” Aravita’s business model into other supermarket departments, including baked goods, pastry, cold cuts, fish and meat.
The new capital enables the company to hire additional employees and for future innovation, including inventory management, point-of-sale integration and technology development like AI and computer vision for process automation.
Qualcomm-backed Aravita wants to help Brazilian supermarkets control food waste by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Every year, about 35% of the food supply in the U.S. is wasted. About half of that’s because of picky eaters or outsize restaurant portions, but the rest happens further upstream, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with about 6% to 13% occurring at grocery stores.
For grocery stores, which operate on very thin margins, that loss is significant. The environmental toll is big, too: Grocery store and other retail food losses in the U.S. alone represent 10 million to 20 million metric tons of carbon pollution annually. That’s about as much as some entire countries, like Kenya or Guatemala.
A large part of food waste’s carbon problem happens at the landfill. There, microbes break the food down anaerobically, meaning without oxygen. That process releases methane, a greenhouse gas that’s 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Landfills can capture the methane and burn it, using it to produce power, for example.
Burning the methane transforms it into carbon dioxide and some other pollutants. While the pollution burden isn’t ideal, from a climate perspective, it’s probably better than the alternative. Only about a fifth of all U.S. landfills capture the gas; the rest just let it seep into the atmosphere.
Part of the problem with landfill gas is that it can be hard to capture. If you’ve ever seen a landfill, you probably understand why. They’re not exactly precision machines.
Intercepting food waste before it hits the landfill changes the equation, though. That’s where Divert hopes to step in.
The company, which was founded in 2007, works with grocery store chains like Ahold Delhaize, Albertsons, Kroger, Safeway and Target to tackle the problem. It starts by analyzing a store’s waste stream and suggesting ways to minimize waste in the first place.
Divert bags $100M growth equity, $1B financing to tackle grocery store food waste by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
Welcome back, climate tech readers! Like last week, we’ve got a full slate once more, from food waste to wastewater and more. Let’s dive in.
Image Credits: Mill Industries
After selling Nest to Google for $3.2 billion, Matt Rogers is no stranger to scaling fast. But unlike last time, Rogers isn’t interested in selling so quickly. “This is the next 20 years of my life. This is not like, build the company in four or five years and sell to Google. This is a big, long journey,” he told TechCrunch.
Rogers is on a quest to end food waste, which accounts for 6% to 8% of all greenhouse gas emissions, and his tool to accomplish that is the humble kitchen trash can. Mill Industries’ bin is sleek and tech enabled, dehydrating and grinding food until it resembles dried coffee grounds. Then, when it’s full, it automatically requests a box to mail the dried food scraps to one of Mill’s facilities, where it’s turned into chicken feed. How does it get there? That part surprised Rogers the most.
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Image Credits: Guillermo Legaria Schweizer/Getty Images
Industrial facilities from semiconductor plants to automotive factories use surprising amounts of water. What comes out the other end can be challenging to treat and even more challenging to reuse. Which is why Membrion has developed a ceramic membrane that can filter out heavy metals like lead, arsenic and lithium. The startup is $7 million into a Series B round that it hopes will bring in another $3 million.
Image Credits: Britishvolt (opens in a new window)
Britishvolt was always a bit of a long shot, but the battery manufacturing startup appears to have missed its target completely. This week, it announced it was declaring bankruptcy, having made little headway on its planned $4.7 billion gigafactory.
The company’s fall echoes what happened here in the U.S. just over a decade ago, when A123 Systems stumbled and entered bankruptcy itself. But the British version of the story may not have a happy ending. With A123, the U.S. had time to cover. With global battery supply chains solidifying, the U.K.’s domestic battery industry might never catch up.
Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Space programs pride themselves on developing far-out technologies that end up proving their worth here on Earth. Apollo helped catapult computing, and the Space Shuttle did wonders for avionics and materials science. Now, it’s Mars rover Perseverance’s turn.
The MOXIE experiment was built to prove that carbon dioxide can be turned into oxygen on Mars. Chris Graves, who worked on the instrument, thought it could help make use of carbon dioxide on Earth, so he started Noon Energy. The company’s carbon-oxygen battery promises to store electricity for long periods of time at fairly low cost. The startup announced a $28 million Series A this week.
Image Credits: Getty Images
Heat pumps and home energy retrofits have been getting a lot of attention as a result of incentives contained within the Inflation Reduction Act. That makes it a good time to be Sealed. The company predicts how much energy a retrofit will save and converts the up-front installation costs, billing homeowners based on the savings.
For a company that depends so heavily on data, Sealed’s acquisition of Burlington, Vermont-based InfiSense makes, well, sense. Neither company disclosed the terms of the deal. Sealed plans on offering, though not requiring, InfiSense’s sensors to customers to monitor both energy use and indoor air quality.
Climate tech roundup: Food waste, wastewater and the UK’s troubled battery industry by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
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