Valley partner, The Cultured Hub, has announced an expansion of its service offering with the addition of plant cell culturing capabilities, broadening its activities beyond cultured meat and leveraging this technology platform to support the growing field of alternative ingredient production. To mark this milestone, the Hub hosted the first Cultured Plant Cell Event 2025, bringing together start-ups, corporate leaders, and researchers to explore how plant cell culture can complement traditional agriculture and strengthen global supply chains for high-value ingredients such as cocoa, coffee, and citrus.

Originally created to accelerate cultivated meat and cellular agriculture technologies, The Cultured Hub now extends its infrastructure and expertise to plant cell-based processes. This expansion comes at a time when rising commodity prices, climate volatility, and increasing pressure on agricultural systems are driving demand for resilient, sustainable sourcing pathways. Plant cell culture offers a promising approach to enabling controlled, year-round production of key plant compounds independent of farmland, weather, pests, or disease.

“Plant cell cultivation represents an important new frontier in sustainable food and ingredient production,” said Ian Roberts, Chief Technology Officer at Bühler Group. “Many of the same challenges we see in cultivated meat – the need to scale, reduce cost, and ensure quality at industrial levels – also apply here. By expanding The Cultured Hub’s offering into plant cell culture, we are supporting innovators in this transition and giving the food industry a unique platform to explore new, climate resilient ingredient pipelines.”

A dynamic ecosystem of innovators

Throughout the event, participants discussed the pressures facing cocoa, coffee, and citrus supply chains, and how plant cell culturing can serve as a complementary production method for stabilizing ingredient availability. Scientific and technical sessions covered the state of the technology, recent breakthroughs, scale-up challenges, and the path from lab to market.

Start-ups actively pitched their technologies and solutions directly to industry leaders specializing in cocoa, chocolate, and coffee processing, fostering collaboration and potential partnerships. Multiple innovators in plant cell culture also presented their work across coffee, cocoa, and next-generation ingredients, including companies such as Ergo Bioscience, Coffeesai, Phyton Biotech, Spicy Cells, Kokomodo, Food Brewer, Celleste Bio, and GALY. Their contributions illustrated the diversity of approaches underway globally – from cocoa biomass grown in bioreactors to stabilized coffee cell lines and high-value plant compounds produced using controlled fermentation.

“Demand for alternative, climate-resilient ingredients is growing rapidly, and plant cell culture is emerging as a credible sourcing platform,” said Yannick Jones, CEO of The Cultured Hub. “Yet the field still faces high costs and complex technical challenges. By providing shared bioprocess infrastructure and a collaborative environment, The Cultured Hub enables both start-ups and corporates to scale more efficiently, shorten development timelines, and explore where strategic partnerships and investments can unlock the next wave of innovation.”

A scientific frontier with commercial momentum

The event also featured a keynote from Prof. Dr. Ing. Regine Eibl-Schindler, ZHAW School of Life Sciences and Facility Management, who introduced the emerging discipline of microbotanics – the cultivation of plant cells to produce targeted metabolites, flavors, and functional compounds with precision and consistency. This global network advancing plant cell research and its applications, connects researchers, start-ups, and industry to accelerate innovation in sustainable plant biotechnology.

“Plant cell factories allow us to produce molecules or biomass that are difficult, slow, or expensive to obtain from fields, while reducing exposure to climate and disease risks,” said Philippe Jutras, Founder of the Plant Cell Institute. “But as with any new technology, scaling is the bottleneck. Events like this create essential alignment between researchers, start-ups, and industry so we can move from promising lab results to meaningful commercial impact.”

A new offering to accelerate the future of ingredients

Plant cell culturing remains an emerging field, with costs driven by sterile bioreactors, energy-intensive controlled environments, and the complexity of plant cell biology. Scaling from flasks to pilot systems is technically demanding and often beyond the reach of early-stage companies. The Cultured Hub’s expansion directly addresses these challenges by providing access to advanced bioprocess equipment, expert process development support, and a neutral platform for collaboration.

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Vivent Biosignals, the Swiss-based pioneer of “wearables for plants”, has announced new investment from Agri Investment Fund (AIF), Horticoop, Pymwymic and Swiss private investors. The funding will accelerate Vivent’s commercial scaling of its breakthrough plant biosignal monitoring technology, which is transforming crop management and sustainable food production.

“We are thrilled to welcome Agri Investment Fund as a new investor, joining Pymwymic and Horticoop,” said Carrol Plummer, Co-founder of Vivent Biosignals. “ This investment comes at a pivotal moment. In 2025, we successfully launched our live outdoor crop health platform, now monitoring more than 1,000 hectares across Europe. With Agri Investment Fund, we gain a partner deeply embedded in European agriculture and food value chains—exactly the kind of strategic alignment we need to accelerate our growth and deliver value at scale.”

Vivent ’s technology uses AI to interpret plants’ own biosignals, enabling growers to detect stress from pests, disease, drought and nutrient imbalances days, weeks or even months before visual symptoms appear. These “plant-first ” insights give farmers the ability to act early, improve yield stability, and use inputs more precisely. Vivent is the first company to commercialize real-time plant electrophysiology as a crop health diagnostic and prediction system—transforming the way growers understand and respond to what their plants need.

One of Vivent ’s satisfied clients, Tom Vlaemynck, Managing Director and CEO of TomatoMasters, comments “Vivent helps us improve fruit quality and reduce our waste percentage. From the first look at their model results we could already see that we needed to focus on changing different parameters than we expected.”

“Recent advances in AI allow us to interpret plants’ internal signal networks with a level of precision that was previously impossible,” said Dr. Nigel Wallbridge, Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Vivent Biosignals. “By scaling in outdoor agriculture, we’ve built the world’s largest dataset of crop biosignals—unlocking insights that benefit individual growers, research partners, and policymakers. With our new investors, we are accelerating the global shift toward plant-driven, resource-efficient agriculture as well as tackling some of the critical blights that threaten global food production.”

Vivent’s platform helps growers improve yields, optimize input use, and enable more sustainable crop protection strategies. Already proven in greenhouses and indoor farms, the technology is increasingly deployed across field crops such as berries, potatoes, apples, and grapes—providing continuous, real-time plant health insights across a wide range of production environments in Europe and North America. In addition to supporting growers directly, Vivent partners with leading suppliers in crop protection, fertilization, irrigation, and horticultural lighting to evaluate how plants respond to interventions—live, in situ, and in real time. Plant breeders also rely on
Vivent signals to assess the resilience of new varieties, accelerating the development of hardier crops.

“We see enormous potential for Vivent ’s technology to improve both farmer profitability and environmental sustainability,” said Patrik Haesen, CEO of Agri Investment Fund. “By giving crops a voice, Vivent is enabling a new era of precise, plant-led decision-making in agriculture—and we are excited to support the company’s growth.”

About Vivent Biosignals

Vivent Biosignals, founded by serial entrepreneurs Carrol Plummer and Dr. Nigel Wallbridge, provides real-time crop health monitoring and actionable agronomic insights by decoding plants’ own electrical signals with advanced AI. Our team of plant scientists, data scientists, and commercial specialists works with controlled-environment growers, agricultural distributors, food processors, and crop protection companies across Europe to help farmers improve productivity sustainably.

For more information, visit https://vivent-biosignals.com/ 

About Agri Investment Fund

Agri Investment Fund (AIF) is an agri-food focused investor supporting companies that deliver high-impact innovation across the agricultural value chain, from farm productivity to sustainablefood systems. AIF backs technologies that help future-proof European agriculture and increase resilience for growers, processors and consumers.

For more information, visit https://aifund.be/en/

About Horticoop

Horticoop is a cooperative with an active membership base of professional growers in the horticultural sector. Horticoop actively invests in businesses that contribute to the horticultural industry. In doing so, the cooperative supports a sector that meets the needs of a growing population while at the same time minimizing its environmental impact. For comments please contact Hend van Ravestein at H.vanRavestein@Hortic

For more information, visit www.horticoop.com

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Swiss startup Trilliome has won first prize in the EIT Food Accelerator Network’s “Food as Medicine” programme, receiving €50,000 in Tech Validation Funding.

The award supports the company’s mission to develop precision bioactives that reprogram the gut microbiome to restore brain and immune health for healthy aging. The funding will accelerate validation of Trilliome’s AI-driven discovery platform, which transforms upcycled plant sources into targeted gut bioactives that promote resilience and wellbeing.

A milestone year for Trilliome

2025 marks a breakthrough year for the Lausanne-based company. In addition to winning EIT Food’s top accelerator prize, Trilliome also earned second prize at the Aging Research and Drug Discovery (ARDD) Conference – one of the world’s leading events in longevity science – and the Probiota Americas Pioneer Prize for innovation in the microbiome field.

These achievements position Trilliome at the intersection of biotechnology, nutrition, and healthy aging, validating its science-led approach to redefining how food and bioactives can drive measurable health outcomes.

Turning plant waste into human health

Trilliome’s proprietary AI and human gut model platform identifies molecular combinations that reprogramme the microbiome, boosting keystone bacterial species and restoring functions linked to brain and immune health.

The company’s lead bioactive product is derived from upcycled fruit and plant waste streams, supporting both human health and planetary sustainability. Early studies in human models show increased levels of beneficial gut bacteria and higher production of short-chain fatty acids such as butyrate and propionate, key compounds for cognitive health, mood regulation, and immune balance.

Accelerating toward measurable impact

The EIT Food Tech Validation Award provides critical support as Trilliome advances toward clinical validation, scalable manufacturing, and regulatory readiness. These steps will help bring its innovations to market and enable new partnerships across the ingredients, supplements, and medical foods sectors.

Together with its partners and mentors, Trilliome is working to build a future where nutrition and biotechnology converge to deliver measurable health outcomes and promote healthy longevity.

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