Latest News & Insights
Stay informed with the latest developments, insights, and announcements from the AgriVentures ecosystem.
The Natura 2000 Award: An Overlooked Recognition Opportunity for Agrifood Innovators
Most funding conversations in agrifood focus on grants and investment. The Natura 2000 Award works differently. It is not a source of capital, it is the European Commission's flagship recognition for projects that show what protecting biodiversity actually looks like in practice, and for farmers, cooperatives, and agrifood businesses already doing that work, it can open doors that a grant application never will. The European Commission's Directorate-General for Environment launched the 8th...
Techstars Has Applications Open. Here's What It Means If You're Building in Agrifood
Techstars runs applications across dozens of accelerator tracks throughout the year, and keeping up with which ones are open, and which ones actually fit your startup, is close to a full-time job on its own. For founders working in agrifood specifically, the track worth knowing about is Techstars Future of Food Powered by Ecolab, the direct successor to the earlier Techstars Farm to Fork Accelerator. What the Programme Actually Offers Future of Food is built around a single question: how do we...
Opportunities Expiring Soon: The Agrifood-Relevant Calls Worth Your Attention in September 2026
Every week, dozens of startup competitions, fellowships, and grant programmes announce deadlines across every sector imaginable, from civic AI to postsecondary education to mental health nonprofits. Most of it has nothing to do with agrifood. Buried inside that noise, though, are a handful of calls that genuinely fit farmers, agtech founders, and food innovators, and they close just as fast as everything else. Here is what actually matters from this month's feed, and why it matters. AIM Startup...
The Events Calendar Most Agrifood Founders Never Check
Funding calls get all the attention, but a surprising amount of what determines whether an application succeeds happens before the deadline, at info days, applicant workshops, and industry gatherings where programme officers explain evaluation criteria that never make it into the written call text. The European Commission maintains a running events listing on its Funding & Tenders Portal covering exactly this kind of session across every EU funding programme, agrifood included, and most...
This Week in AgriFood: What the Latest Funding and M&A News Actually Signals
Industry news moves fast, and it's easy to read a headline about a Series B or an acquisition without registering what it means for the funding and investment landscape underneath it. Here's a roundup of recent agrifood developments, reported by AgFunderNews, organized by what they actually signal for founders and investors across our core focus areas. Digital Farming: Precision Data Keeps Attracting Capital TerraBlaster raised a $12.5 million seed round to commercialize real-time NPK soil...
Carbon Farming Funding in the EU: Turning Soil Into Capital in 2026
A hectare of regeneratively managed soil in Europe is now worth more than the crop it grows. Thanks to the EU's new carbon farming certification framework, expanding voluntary carbon markets, and a fresh wave of Horizon Europe and LIFE grants, 2026 is shaping up to be the most lucrative year yet for farmers, agri-cooperatives, and agtech startups willing to measure and prove their climate impact. Most of that money is going unclaimed. Not because the opportunities don't exist, but because...
Closing the Funding Gap: What Women-Led Agrifood Startups Need to Know in 2026
At the seed stage, women founders in deep tech and agrifood receive just 15 percent of available funding, compared with 85 percent for men. At the early and late stage venture capital level, that share drops even further, to 11 percent. On the farm itself, the average holding operated by a woman is 5.84 hectares, against 12.88 hectares for a man, a structural gap that compounds every disadvantage built on top of it. These aren't abstract statistics. AgriVentures laid them out in detail in...
Circular Agrifood & ESG: The Funding Category Growing Faster Than Founders Expect
If you're building anything that turns agricultural waste into a resource, closes a supply chain loop, or gives farms and food companies a way to measure ESG performance, 2026 is a genuinely good year to be asking for funding. AgriVentures recently mapped five EU grants targeting circular agrifood systems and women-led ventures, with some offering funding rates as high as 100 percent. That's not a typo. A subset of circular economy and ESG calls in the EU's current programming period are...
Where Agrifood Biotech and Research Funding Is Actually Going in 2026
Basic research doesn't fund itself, and in agrifood, the gap between a promising lab result and a fundable project often comes down to knowing which of a dozen overlapping EU programmes to approach first. Food safety science, biotech platforms, and multi-country research consortia each follow their own funding logic, and 2026 has brought fresh calls across all three. Two Live Examples Worth Studying Safe-Agri, one of AgriVentures' active projects, is reinforcing the security assessment...
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