Food Transition

Stand­ing Ova­tion, a play­er in the food tran­si­tion, announced today a Series A financ­ing round of 12 mil­lion Euro led by Astanor Ven­tures, with the par­tic­i­pa­tion of Peak­bridge, Sev­en­ture Part­ners, Big Idea Ven­tures, Good Start­up, and of a lead­ing play­er in the food indus­try. This round, com­plet­ed less than 2 years after its cre­ation, will be used to finance the next phase in the company’s devel­op­ment and scale its tech­nol­o­gy to meet indus­tri­al demand.

Glob­al pro­tein demand, and ani­mal pro­tein in par­tic­u­lar, is increas­ing­ly dra­mat­i­cal­ly with a rapid­ly grow­ing glob­al pop­u­la­tion and glob­al diets shift­ing towards ani­mal-based prod­ucts. Yet live­stock farm­ing today rep­re­sents 15 per­cent of green­house gas emis­sions and inten­sive live­stock farm­ing is con­sid­ered uneth­i­cal by a grow­ing num­ber of people.

Stand­ing Ova­tion’s ambi­tion is to con­tribute to the agri­food tran­si­tion by devel­op­ing ani­mal and lac­tose-free sub­sti­tutes for cheese and dairy prod­ucts, using dairy pro­teins pro­duced by micro­bial fer­men­ta­tion. Thanks to a sim­ple but inno­v­a­tive process, the com­pa­ny pro­duces caseins, with­out any recourse to ani­mal prod­ucts. Caseins are not only the major pro­teins in milk (over 80 per­cent), but also the pro­teins that allow it to cur­dle and give cheese its func­tion­al melt­ing and stretch­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics cus­tomers are crav­ing. Stand­ing Ova­tion has shown that these caseins can then be used, with oth­er prod­ucts of veg­e­tal or min­er­al ori­gin, to obtain true repli­cas of cheese prod­ucts, with a focus on fresh and soft cheeses.

The round, ini­tial­ly planned for a total of 10 mil­lion Euro, but over­sub­scribed up to 12 mil­lion Euro, will enable the com­pa­ny to finance its growth, and in par­tic­u­lar to bring casein pro­duc­tion process to indus­tri­al scale, to per­fect its prod­ucts and to ini­ti­ate the reg­u­la­to­ry process, while con­tin­u­ing to devel­op its R&D activ­i­ty to cre­ate new prod­ucts and formulations.

Fred­er­ic Paques, CEO of Stand­ing Ova­tion, said: “Stand­ing Ova­tion’s tech­nol­o­gy has a tremen­dous poten­tial. How­ev­er, bring­ing the prod­ucts rapid­ly to the mar­ket requires sig­nif­i­cant resources, and sub­stan­tial fund­ing had become nec­es­sary. Astanor Ven­tures, which had already sup­port­ed us at an ear­li­er stage, under­stood it as did the oth­er par­tic­i­pants in this round. We would like to thank all our investor part­ners for their sup­port and their con­fi­dence in the team.”

Romain Chay­ot, Sci­en­tif­ic Direc­tor of Stand­ing Ova­tion, said: “In only two years, we have devel­oped a unique and high­ly tech­no­log­i­cal process. We are now in a strong posi­tion to build on this momen­tum and tran­si­tion towards more logis­ti­cal­ly inten­sive stages, espe­cial­ly scal­ing up.”

Eric Archam­beau, co-founder of Astanor Ven­tures, said: “Stand­ing Ovation’s tech­nol­o­gy rep­re­sents a par­a­digm shift for the ani­mal-free dairy mar­ket. Casein is the holy grail for the pro­duc­tion of alter­na­tive options that match con­ven­tion­al prod­ucts in nutri­tion, taste and tex­ture yet it has remained noto­ri­ous­ly dif­fi­cult to cre­ate. The founders’ expe­ri­ence in biotech­nol­o­gy enabled them to find the key to casein devel­op­ment, a step ahead of many com­pa­nies. We are great­ly impressed by the team’s advance­ments over the past year both in prod­uct and process devel­op­ment and are excit­ed to sup­port them in this next step of their journey.