In 2017, achieving the goal of his search fund, David invested in and took his current role as CEO of NovoNutrients, the “food from CO2” company. For the prior dozen years, he was the sole manager of Aquacopia Ventures, which he had co-founded. Across that aquaculture micro venture capital portfolio and his prior, co-founded startup, his six companies raised $250M. The first, an online industrial marketplace called Network International, was acquired by Liquidity Services (NASDAQ: LQDT). David led the fund’s investment into Nutrinsic and spent nearly a decade with its board. Nutrinsic was a microbial protein aquafeed company not unlike NovoNutrients. Its assets were acquired by iCell. After earning an economics A.B. from Princeton, David’s career had started in internet technologies – doing strategy, general management, and entrepreneurial corporate development.
Did you know?
Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao have an uncanny talent for finding value where others see waste. Their plastics upcycling company, Novoloop, just raised an $21m Series A to prove it.
To find the future of food, you may have to look no further than Emeryville, CA, a small city by the San Francisco Bay, where Upside Foods has built a 53,000-square-foot production facility for cultivated meat, the first of its kind.
In a timeless dilemma for new parents, Radhika and her husband Bharath discovered early that their baby daughter was a fussy sleeper. The situation left them tired and frustrated; being effective at work became a challenge.
The question for Sumit Sinha and Mukesh Bansal in February 2019 was which would come first: The funding for their seed round or the sale of their Hyundai hatchbacks.
In December 2021 Prellis raised a $14.5 million Series B and has signed partnerships with pharmaceutical behemoths including Bristol Myers Squibb and Sanofi.
It was 2016, and Chiu Chau was on the ropes. He had pitched nearly 150 venture capital firms. No one would invest. Everyone doubted the startup with the open-source laboratory robot.
Tesh Mbaabu rarely showed up to his freshman computer science class at the University of Nairobi. His classmate Mesongo Sibuti noticed.
Adebayo (“Ade”) Alonge and Amy Kao, co-founders of RxAll had nvented a handheld scanner for detecting counterfeit prescription drugs—an illicit, multibillion-dollar industry that kills an estimated 1 million people annually globally and 100,000 in Africa.