NEWS FEED & ADDITIVE MAGAZINE October 2022 97 Bond Pet Foods, the Colorado-based company creating meat proteins through fermentation for pet food applications, announced that it has completed its Series A fundraise totaling $17.5 million. The oversubscribed round includes investment from global food and agriculture pioneers ADM Ventures (Archer Daniels Midland Company) and Cavallo Ventures (Wilbur Ellis); institutional funds Genoa Ventures and Lever VC; food/tech and sustainability investors Thia Ventures, iSelect Fund, Stage 1 Fund, Lifely VC and Satori Capital, as well as music icons Sia Isabelle Furler and Joan Jett. The funding will be used to expand Bond's meat protein portfolio and scale up production at a new 15,000 square foot facility in central Boulder, Colorado. The Series A will also allow Bond to more than triple the size of its team, strengthening its science, technical and regulatory competency. Bond Pet Foods was founded in 2017 with a mission to create more sustainable, responsible, and humane food by reimagining meat, the mainstay of our pets' diets. Bond is employing precision fermentation to produce nutritionally complete, nature-identical chicken, beef, fish and other meat proteins for pet food applications. Bond's production process is safe and established, similar to that routinely used to make common food ingredients such as lactic acid, vitamin B12 and enzymes for cheese production- no animal farming required. Prior to this Series A round, Bond raised $2.5M from investors including Lever VC, Agronomics, KBW Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures and Trellis Road, bringing its total funding to-date to $20M. In November of last year Bond also announced an industry-first partnership with Hill's Pet Nutrition, to develop a craft meat protein for its product portfolio. Bond Pet Foods closes $17.5m in Series A funding to scale meat proteins US-based Bond Pet Foods completed $17.5 million in Series A funding to scale nutritionally complete meat proteins produced through precision fermentation. In coordination with Feedstuffs, the American Feed Industry Association (AFIA) has opened applications for its Premix/Ingredient Feed Facility of the Year (FFY) program. Submissions are due by November 11. The program is open to all AFIA member premix/ingredient feed manufacturing facilities. The winning facility will be recognized on March 8, 2023, at the AFIA's 2023 Purchasing and Ingredient Suppliers Conference in Orlando, Florida. The winning plant manager will receive overnight accommodations and a free registration to the conference. "Participating in the FFY program can be incredibly valuable for facilities," said Gary Huddleston, AFIA's director of feed manufacturing and regulatory affairs. "Participating facilities receive an individual report on how their facility measures against other facilities within the category. In addition, it gives members an opportunity to show off their dedication to safety and efficiency." Premix/Ingredient Feed Facility of the Year applications open
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTUxNjkxNQ==