Future Food Asia is a first of its kind conference, bringing together the various stakeholders in AgriFood innovation with the goal of providing a comprehensive perspective on Asia Pacific’s role in the Future of Food.
Future Food Asia has announced the 10 finalists that will vie for a US$ 100,000 grand prize at the upcoming Future Food Asia Conference taking place in Singapore 3-4 June 2019 – AgNet, Biotelliga, Inong Agriculture, Jai Kisan, MPT AgTech, RapidAIM, SaliCrop, SatSure, The Wave Talk and UlikeKorea. Along with the 10 finalists, four startups will be awarded the StartupSG prizes of S$ 50,000 each – Intello Labs, Phyto Corporation, Shiok Meats and VakSea. In addition to these prizes, ADB Ventures will award market expansion pilot funding up to US$ 250,000 to select finalists with high-impact sustainable agriculture solutions.
In the presence of Singapore’s Ambassador-at-Large Ong Keng Yong as the Guest of Honor, the conference will allow all finalists and winners to present their innovation in front of investors, industry leaders and domain experts.
As in the past two editions, the Future Food Asia Award jury for the selection of the 10 finalists consists of: Gérard Jacquin, former Director of Partnerships, Transfer and Innovation at INRA, Europe’s leading agricultural research institute; Dr. Ralph Graichen, Director of Food & Consumer at A*STAR’s Biomedical Research Council; Victoria de la Huerga, Vice President of ADM Ventures, Archer Daniels Midland Company; and Isabelle Decitre, Founder and CEO of ID Capital. As the government agency overseeing the food sector in Singapore, Enterprise Singapore focuses on fostering market-led innovation, where technology solutions are developed based on the opportunities and problem statements faced by industry players across markets. For this reason, the agency has chosen to reward startups that bring promising value add to the budding agrifood-tech ecosystem in the city state. Furthermore, ADB Ventures’ program is designed to encourage startups with sustainable development impact-generating technologies to further expand in the region.
Start-up applications for Future Food Asia 2019 opened in February and closed in April 2019. More than a hundred of contenders applied, coming from 13 different countries from Asia Pacific. While North Asia continued to be the dominant region with 35% of the applications, South East Asia emerged in the second spot with 27%, marginally ahead of South Asia with 26%.
Future Food Asia is a first of its kind conference, bringing together the various stakeholders in AgriFood innovation with the goal of providing a comprehensive perspective on Asia Pacific’s role in the Future of Food.
“The line-up of finalists and winners evidences the wide range of technologies that can address some of the most critical challenges of the food supply chain. It is also interesting to notice how Artificial Intelligence is emerging as distinctive feature of the region’s propositions”, says Isabelle Decitre from ID Capital.
Ted Tan, Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Enterprise Singapore, said, “Platforms such as Future Food Asia Award play an important role in the innovation ecosystem by bringing together the vibrant ideas of startups from across Asia to grow better and healthier food in an environmentally-conscious manner. Enterprise Singapore’s partnership with ID Capital for FFAA is now in its third year. ID Capital has also recently been appointed as our co-investment partner for SEEDS Capital in agrifood-tech startups. Together, we look forward to scale up our food production capabilities and eventually export the technologies and innovations globally.”
For its third edition Future Food Asia received continued support from one of the world’s largest agricultural processor and food ingredient provider Archer Daniels Midland Company (NYSE: ADM), Singapore’s lead public research agency A*STAR (Agency for Science, Technology and Research), enterprise development agency Enterprise Singapore and the Singapore Economic Development Board. They are joined this year by four new partners: Bühler Group, the leading global technology supplier to the food processing and advanced material manufacturing industry, Alibaba Cloud, the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, Corteva AgriscienceTM, the agriculture division of DowDuPont and ADB Ventures, an Asian Development Bank (ADB) technical assistance program targeting sustainable development impact through technology solutions that enable climate impact, inclusive finance, health, and gender equality.
Overview of the Future Food Asia 2019 Finalists
AgNet (China)
For decades, effective livestock production has been a blend of supplier technology and farmer experience. Shanghai based ag-tech start up AgNet now adds a modern digital portfolio of data, IoT and AI to the mix. They have deployed to market the AgNet cloud solution, which promises to lower livestock production costs and lay the foundation for trusted transparency with food companies and consumers.
Inong Agriculture (Taiwan)
As a bioinformatics startup that specializes in microbial genetic analysis, Inong Agriculture is the big-data powered soil microbe expert which offers pioneering cash-crop-specific solutions that leverage on customized probiotics to increase crop yield sustainably, alleviating the environmental burden from overdoses of chemical fertilizers or pesticides.
Jai Kisan (India)
Jai Kisan is an agri-fintech platform catering to rural emerging markets by providing a risk-adjusted return to lenders while ensuring a low cost of capital and quick turnaround time with minimal documentation for the borrower. Jai Kisan finances agricultural equipment, dairy, and other yield generating rural assets.
Biotelliga (New Zealand)
Biotelliga utilizes fungi, nature’s plant-interaction specialists, to develop sustainable technologies to protect crops from pests and diseases, allowing increased food production with low environmental impact. Biotelliga’s bio pesticides and seed-integrated protective fungi will enable reduction in use and ultimately replacement of environmentally harmful chemical pesticides.
MPT AgTech (Australia)
https://www.moistureplant.com/
Moisture Planting Technologies (MPT) are building a range of tech-enabled, smart equipments for large scale farming operations. Their first product is a tech-enabled planter that can monitor the conditions of the soil in real time while seeding, and self-adjust its seeding depth, and seeding rate live, based on the measured soil profile.
RapidAIM (Australia)
RapidAIM takes the guesswork out of pest surveillance, detection and management. Delivered as a service, RapidAIM provides high-resolution, real-time information of the location of pests for early detection, and targeted control. With RapidAIM users have confidence that control is working and crops are protected. Know now. Act early.
SaliCrop (Israel)
Salicrop develops a unique, non-GM, seeds treatment for various crops varieties, vegetables and grain seeds. The seeds treatment stimulates a specific epigenetic trait of the plant which enables crop growing and yielding in high salinity soils or when irrigated with brackish water. Salicrop is a portfolio company of Rimonim Agro fund.
SatSure (India)
SatSure is an innovative large area analytics company which leverages advances in satellites, machine learning and Big Data analytics to provide answers to large-area questions, with agriculture, forestry, and environmental management. We combine satellite imagery with weather, IoT, social and economic datasets, etc to generate timely, location specific insights.
THE.WAVE.TALK (South Korea)
THE.WAVE.TALK detects bacteria in liquids much faster than conventional technologies. We target to save millions of hours spent just waiting for the result by decreasing test time from days to hours (applications from water/beverage plants to water purifiers at home). Moreover, by applying AI, we are able not only to detect but also identify bacteria.
UlikeKorea (South Korea)
UlikeKorea is a livestock ICT company with a smart livestock solution called LiveCare. The solution was developed with the support of globally respected Korean R&D institutions, this solution builds on a bio-capsule that once ingested by the animal, enables lifelong health monitoring. As the interest in sustainable animal husbandry continues to increase, we aim to make every effort to contribute to the advancement of the global livestock industry.
Overview of the StartupSG Prize Winners
Intello Labs (India)
Intello Labs is a deeptech startup that uses Artificial Intelligence and multispectral tools to make quality monitoring and grading solutions for food commodities. Its image-based solutions, which come in the form of smartphone apps, bring transparency and standardization to the quality assessment process in food supply chains, reducing value risk and wastage from farm to fork.
Phyto Corporation (South Korea)
Phyto Corporation is an innovative food & biotechnology company creating the future of food with Salicornia, a plant grown by seawater. Phyto Corporation has developed the world’s first 100% plant-based salt, “PhytoSalt,” extracted from Salicornia, a plant containing high contents of salt. PhytoSalt is effective on high blood pressure and is a microplastics-free salt as well. By desalinating Salicornia, Phyto Corporation has also developed a new superfood and flour alternative, “PhytoMeal,” that can solve the global food crisis.
Shiok Meats (Singapore)
Shiok Meats is a cell-based shrimp company, the first of its kind in Singapore (Shiok in Singapore English means enjoyable and fantastic). Their aim is to bring cell-based crustaceans to your table, which is health-, animal- and environment-friendly, by growing cells instead of animals. Shiok Meats is co-founded and led by Dr Sandhya Sriram (CEO) and Dr Ling Ka Yi (CTO) – both stem cell and developmental biology scientists with over 20 years of combined experience.
VakSea (United States of America)
VakSea uses insect larvae to biomanufacture functional feed additives that protect farm-raised fish and shrimp from disease. Using its innovative insect larvae production platform, VakSea can produce large-scale quantities of affordable protein-based feed additives for a variety of purposes, starting with preventing viral disease outbreaks on shrimp aquaculture farms.
ID Capital is an investment company headquartered in Singapore specialized in the domain of AgriTech and FoodTech in the Asia-Pacific region. ID Capital is a pioneer in the agrifood sector in Asia-Pacific and has contributed effort and capital in also catalyzing the ecosystem in the region through its Future Food Asia platform launched in 2016. Its thesis is built on the fact that in this growing vertical, Asia-Pacific is the nexus between high growth and high stakes. ID Capital is also an Appointed Co-investment Partner of SEEDS Capital, the investment arm of Enterprise Singapore for the AgriFoodTech sector.