Anterra Capital, a specialist venture firm investing in food and agriculture, today announced its $100 million first close of Fund III. Founded in 2013 with offices in Amsterdam and Boston, the firm manages over $500 million across three funds. Anterra invests in and builds companies that apply life-science and software innovations to food and agriculture. The Fund III's first close marks an important milestone for Anterra.
The firm was built on the conviction that the tools that had already transformed other industries — life science tools that reshaped human health, and software that rewired sectors from logistics to financial services — would eventually transition to, and transform, food and agriculture.
“The firm has now successfully navigated two capital cycles in food and agriculture,” said Maarten Goossens, Partner at Anterra Capital.
“Each one rewarded the same discipline: backing companies that deliver real returns for their customers and to their investors. What's different this time is that the real-world industries we operate in — large, complex and historically resistant to change — are now ready to be rewired, and the tools to do it have arrived.”
Food and agriculture remains the largest industry on the planet, roughly $10 trillion in size, employing around 1.3 billion people, nearly 40 per cent of the world's workforce. It is also where a set of structural forces converges — margin volatility, food security, climate and water constraints, tightening regulation, and health outcomes increasingly tied to what the system produces — each a reason the old way of operating no longer holds.
