168: What are the global hotspots for food and agtech?

What are the leading global food and agtech scenes? In this episode of Table Talk we join experts from the food and agtech investment community to shed some light on how countries are helping to support innovation and disruption and find out what is the secret to success.

Joining host Stefan Gates are Christian Guba, Associate, Atlantic Foods Ivan Farneti, Co-Founder, Five Seasons Ventures and Nadav Berger, Founder & Managing Director, Peakbridge VC. Join the conversation to find out what different countries are doing to nurture food and agtech start-ups in this fascinating look at the future of food.

About our panel

Christian Guba, Associate, Atlantic Foods

Christian is an Investor with Atlantic Food Labs, an early-stage VC Fund & Venture Studio based in Berlin. Atlantic Food Labs invests in ambitious and mission-driven startups along the entire food value chain and has backed companies such as Gorillas, Formo, Mushlabs or Infarm. Christian gained a Master in Management from HHL Leipzig and before joining Atlantic Food Labs he worked with btov Partners, BCG Digital Ventures, and Google.

Ivan Farneti, Co-Founder, Five Seasons Ventures

Ivan has been an active venture capital investor for the last 20 years and he is the co-founding Partner of Five Seasons Ventures, the first European venture fund fully focused on Foodtech.

He is passionate about product and technology innovation aimed at solving big challenges in the food industry: from alternative sources of proteins, to functional foods, from new models of food distribution to the reduction of food waste. At Five Seasons he invested in gene editing company Tropic Biosciences, pet nutrition company Butternut Box and three more companies yet to be announced.

His experience from previous venture funds in London, includes structuring venture investments, organisational and strategy development, setting up governance for growth and planning for successful exits. He was an early stage investor in Everbridge, Inc. (Nasdaq: EVBG), Tridion BV (acquired by SDL Plc), Gomez, Inc. (acquired by Compuware), Plazes AG (acquired by Nokia), among others.

In his spare time he enjoys family life, cooking, fly fishing, and practicing karate and jiu jitsu with his son Adam

Nadav Berger, Founder & Managing Director, Peakbridge VC

Coming from a Third generation food industrialist family , Nadav has actively built many companies specialising in food applications, marketing and distribution. In 2008, Nadav co-founded the food applications lab FoodLab. The innovative developments at FoodLab lead to founding FoodLab Capital, a premier seed fund. The successful portfolio includes DouxMatok, InnovoPro, NextFerm and SimpleOrder (exited).

After that Nadav co-founded and is the managing Partner of PeakBridge, a fund manager managing NEWtrition (Nick's, TasteWise, Prenexus, UKKO..)– a series A+ Global fund for FoodTech and FoodSparks® – the 1st. European seed fund with collaboration with the EIT Food. Nadav holds a B.A in economics and political science from Tel Aviv University and an EMBA from Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management.