PoLoPo founders Maya Sapir-Mir and Raya Liberman-Aloni (company pic)
PoLoPo, an Israeli startup producing animal-type proteins from plants, raised $1.75 million in funding led by FoodLabs. Israel is at the forefront of the meat alternatives industry these days with other companies like Redefine Meat, Zero Egg and Mermade Seafoods.
And Israeli construction startup Constru has had its assets frozen by a Tel Aviv court. The company asserts that its $4.5 million in debt resulted from financial problems caused by the unpopular judicial reform plan proposed by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that sparked months of nationwide demonstrations and even led to people taking their money out of the country for fear of what the reforms will do to Israel’s economy.
The company filed a plea with the court for assistance. Constru told the court “A number of investors, including the leading investor in the current investment round, withdrew from their previous intention to invest in the company,” because of Israel’s political turmoil.
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Founded in 2017 by CEO Michael Sasson and Chief Construction Innovation officer Shalom Bellaish, Constru says it is building the future of efficiency with an AI-powered construction solution that turns captured imagery into insights for better data-driven decision making. The company says it drives efficiency on projects by providing teams the ability to get first-hand, image-based data, process it for insight, and see it in context mapped to project plans. Enabling owners, developers, and general contractors to consistently finish projects ahead of schedule and under budget, Constru boasts its customers report average reduction in overall projects costs of 2-4%.
Constru says leading Israeli construction companies like the Ashstrom Group, which is also a shareholder, and Y.H. Demari and construction companies in the US, Korea and Japan are among its clients.
As for PoLoPo, fake food, or artificially and naturally produced alternatives to animal products that are as good as the real thing, is nothing new for Startup Nation. Israel has several firms offering artificial meat through the wonders of 3D printing.
Founded in 2022 by CEO Maya Sapir-Mir and CTO Raya Liberman-Aloni, PoLoPo is developing a plant bio-factory for high scale, custom-made production of proteins. Our first candidate is egg protein (ovalbumin) in an edible plant.
Using directed metabolic engineering techniques, while exploiting the full potential of plants as diverse metabolite and green protein factories, PoLoPo says it creates a “superAA” plant. The superAA is able to produce considerable high amounts of free amino-acids. The elevated production of amino-acids is then translated into high scale production of proteins in plant organs.
On the second phase PoLoPo uses superAA plants as the basic plants for the creation of a new set of plants, expressing and accumulating the target protein (such as egg protein) in plant sink organs.
We’re glad to have won a group of such renowned and like-minded investors”, said Dr. Maya Sapir-Mir. “With this substantial funding we are aiming to reach several significant milestones including protein rich potato tubers and Ovalbumin functional samples.”
“We want to produce better food for the world. Molecular farming technology, being harnessed for the production of high-quality proteins, presents a huge opportunity to do so, alongside with taking the animals out of the equation and reducing the carbon footprint of the production process” said PoLoPo’s Dr. Raya Liberman-Aloni.
