Recently, Adisseo, an overseas company of Bluestar, and Seventure Partners, a European venture capital firm, announced the setup of an innovative venture capital fund - AVF, targeted at supporting companies in the field of animal health, feed and nutrition. AVF's first fundraising closed at EUR24 million.
Seventure Partners is the world's leading venture capital firm in life sciences, dedicated to financing innovations, and it is also the manager of AVF privately-offered fund. Adisseo, the fund's cornerstone investor, is a world-leading producing enterprise of animal nutrition additives, with products dominating the global market, owning international advanced methionine production technology and multiple patents.
The livestock sector is undergoing profound changes requiring the entire food chain to adapt accordingly to respond to strong global pressures and changing consumer expectations. The rapidly growing world population and the increased demand from emerging countries for animal protein, as well as the increasing attention of the international community on environmental protection and sustainable production present significant challenges to the sector.
At a global level, AVF’s investment strategy focuses on two segments at the forefront of the modern agricultural and livestock revolution: animal health and nutrition, and digital technologies serving the livestock industry.
In the sector of animal health and nutrition, the investment will focus on improving the food’s digestibility and nutritional value, tapping the energy potential of raw materials, improving the entire animal food chain and providing solutions to reducing the impact on the environment.
In addition, the digital agricultural technology field has seen exponential growth, driven by climate change and scarcity in resources and biodiversity, as well as heightened pressure from increasingly demanding consumers. AVF will actively finance digital innovations applied to the livestock value chain, such as smart breeding and diagnosis, feed control and traceability tools.
AVF primarily invested in Europe and North America, but will also be open to strong investment proposals from other regions, including Asia.
Isabelle de Cremoux, CEO and Managing Partner at Seventure Partners, stated: “Since the implementation of our new strategy in 2013, we have launched several institutional funds with defined investment themes, connecting prestigious strategic investors with serial entrepreneurs and financial institutional investors. We have launched funds in digital technologies as well as in life sciences, raising EUR160 million with strategic partners such as Danone, Novartis, Tereos, Lesaffre and Bel. We are now launching AVF, a new fund in animal health and nutrition.”
Isabelle de Cremoux added that this fund aimed to address a very specific and expanding need in the market - preserving animal health, and develop technologies to cultivate and produce food in a better way. The company was proud to count Adisseo among the privileged partners who shared the vision and would announce the first investments in the near future
Jean-Marc Dublanc, CEO of Adisseo, stated that Adisseo had been committed to propelling business development with innovative technology, with the aim of enriching the portfolio of R&D innovations while respecting a mode of sustainable growth. With AVF, the goal was to invest in strategic collaborations combining the agility of start-ups with Adisseo's expertise. As such, Adisseo was very pleased to become a strategic investor in AVF.