SWITZERLAND – Icos Capital, a prominent climate tech venture capital fund, partnered with Bühler, a global milling technology provider, to host the “Collaborative Innovation Summit” at Bühler’s CUBIC Innovation Campus on February 29, 2024.
This event marked a pivotal moment in the convergence of investors, industry stalwarts, and promising start-ups from the food, chemicals, and biotech sectors, all unified in their mission to expedite sustainable solutions.
The summit aimed to facilitate collaboration and innovation among diverse participants, driving start-ups towards scalable solutions for the food and chemical industries’ most pressing challenges.
Preceding the main event was the “Collaboration Day” held in “The Valley,” where discussions centered around potential avenues for start-ups to collaborate effectively with industry partners such as The Cultured HUB, ERIDIA, and Bühler.
Peter van Gelderen, General Partner at Icos Capital, articulated the firm’s mission, stating, “Our goal at Icos Capital is to identify and invest in next-level innovations to accelerate sustainability.”
The event at Bühler’s CUBIC Innovation Campus exemplified this ethos, serving as a nexus for visionary entrepreneurs, discerning investors, and industry pioneers equipped with the requisite knowledge and technology to effectuate positive change at scale.
A core facet of the summit was the opportunity for over 30 start-ups from across Europe to showcase their innovations and explore potential collaborations with corporations, igniting a spark of synergy that promises mutually beneficial partnerships in the future.
Ian Roberts, Chief Technology Officer of Bühler, affirmed the company’s commitment to bolstering collaborative venturing, envisioning a sustainable future facilitated by strategic alliances and innovative solutions.
The emergence of promising technologies, particularly in precision fermentation, bio-based chemicals, and side-stream valorization, has further invigorated efforts toward sustainability.
Start-ups like MoA FoodTech and Abolis epitomize this trend, leveraging cutting-edge methodologies to transform agricultural by-products into high-value ingredients and engineer bio-based solutions for diverse industrial applications, respectively.
Bosco Emparanza García, CEO and co-founder of MoA FoodTech underscored the significance of partnerships with industrial stakeholders, affirming, “This summit is crucial for us to build partnerships with the industrial capacity, knowledge, and drive to take our technology to the next level and accelerate our impact along the food value chains.”
Similarly, Cyrille Pauthenier, CEO of Abolis, emphasized the indispensability of collaboration in scaling up impactful technologies, asserting, “Start-ups are mostly technology developers that don’t have the capacity to make full use of their technology. We need large industrial players to scale up, and the contacts we made today will help us to combine expertise, and capabilities, and to grow.”
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