Food Business Africa | Agritech startup MooMe secures investment from Maxula seed fund to support cattle farmers
Summary
Startup Maxula Seed Fund, to which the insurance company MAE (Mutuelle Assurance de l’Enseignement) and the Arab Tunisian Bank (ATB) are subscribed, mainly intervenes to help promoters of startups to exploit invention patents, to complete the technical and economic study of the project as well as to develop the technological process of the product before the marketing phase, and finally to complete the financing scheme. The fund which obtained the authorization and the visa of Tunisia’s Financial Market Council (CMF) respectively on November 21 and December 19, 2018, aims to carry out transactions in capital or quasi-capital with a perspective of value creation over a medium / long term horizon. One of the investors, Khaled Helioui, sees this success as a boost for the remainder of the tech ecosystem, which should concentrate on quality rather than quantity. More than EUR10 million (US$12.09m) was raised in 2020 by the Tunisian-French startup NextProtein, which produces insect-based animal feed and fertilizer from black soldier fly larvae. NextProtein plans to scale production to 100,000 tonnes per year by 2025, or an estimated 10% of the total insect protein market globally.