Mandalay Venture Partners

I couldn’t say it any better than my business partner Timothy Hui puts it below. A fascinating week in Manila meeting with some incredibly impressive organisations. Thanks to the Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade), Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and for the connections and networks. We have work to do to help secure food systems, food security, biosecurity and nutrition for our next generations. Without the member organisations and Asian Development Bank (ADB) highlighting and implementing activities of change we would be far less aware of our situation and responsibilities. Now we need to get to work.

Proud to see Tundra Capital portfolio company Cropify hit a major milestone. Their Ai powered lentil and chickpea grading system is moving into full commercial deployment this harvest, with up to 25 Opal units set to roll out across South Australia, Victoria, northern NSW and Queensland. The standout news is the endorsement from Grain Trade Australia's Trading Standards Committee. It gives grain handlers, exporters and supply chain participants a formal basis to adopt Cropify's technology in commercial operations, something that matters enormously in an industry where trust in grading outcomes has traditionally sat with trained human graders. As CEO Anna Falkiner put it, every truckload represents a season's work and a year's income for a grower. The GTA endorsement signals that AI grading has matured to a point where the industry can have genuine confidence in its accuracy, consistency and objectivity. Cropify already has runs on the board with GrainCorp, Louis Dreyfus Company, ETG Wimpak and Shannon Bros from its first commercial lentil harvest, and is now expanding into chickpeas and export markets including Canada and the US via a Seed Plus raise. This is exactly the kind of technology backed adoption curve we look for. Congratulations to the team on turning industry recognition into commercial momentum. #AgTech #AgriFood #VentureCapital #ArtificialIntelligence #FoodSecurity #Agriculture #PrecisionAgriculture #GrainIndustry #Innovation #AustralianAgriculture #StartupSuccess #DeepTech https://lnkd.in/gGXDZSbR

Some of the biggest startup opportunities are hiding in industries most people never think about. For Cropify founders Anna Falkiner and Andrew Hannon, that opportunity wasn't about building AI for the sake of it. It was about solving a problem they'd seen firsthand: a grain grading system where split-second decisions can determine the value of an entire truckload. Now, after years of hardwork refining their solution and relentless customer conversations, underpinned with their deep industry knowledge, they've grown so much that they've got overseas scaling on the near horizon. Read how Cropify turned a problem worth millions into a growing agritech business 👉 https://lnkd.in/eF-sffsQ

🦚 Proud to see Agscent close a $5m raise, more than doubling its valuation to $26.9m in eighteen months. Operating in the current economic environment has been challenging for all startups, and to see these outcomes gives enormous conviction to our investment thesis across the agrifood tech landscape while highlighting the tenacity of the founders we back. 🧑🌾 Tundra Capital (formerly Mandalay Venture Partners) has backed Dr Bronwyn Darlington and the team since the seed round, and it has been a privilege watching this technology move from concept to real world impact for farmers. 📰 As I told Business News Australia: "Answers that used to take weeks and a lab now happen on the spot, in the yards, in seconds. That kind of in situ diagnostic capability takes real pressure off the farms on timing and cost and it is what convinced us to back Agscent." 🐄 The platform detects pregnancy in cattle in as little as eighteen days, and the broader potential across industrial and environmental monitoring is a welcome bonus on top of the core ag use case. 👏🏻 Congratulations to Bronwyn and the whole Agscent team on this milestone. https://lnkd.in/g9MDhSJB #AgriTech #VentureCapital #DeepTech #AustralianInnovation #AgTech #Biotech #agriculture #productivity

📊 GLP-1 medications have already reshaped weight management. The next disruption may be happening in the food aisle. 🔢 The numbers are hard to ignore. 💊 Industry estimates suggest roughly 18% of US adults now use a GLP-1 medication, though that figure is a headline estimate rather than a peer reviewed data point. 🏠 Cornell research found the share of US households with at least one GLP-1 user rose from around 11% in late 2023 to more than 16% by mid 2024. In the UK, Kantar reported household penetration nearly doubled during 2025, from 2.3% to 4.1%. 🥗 The European meal replacement category was valued at more than 2 billion euro in 2024 and is projected to reach 3.9 billion euro by 2033. 🤔 The more interesting question is what happens when millions of people start eating significantly less. ⚖️ In the STEP 1 semaglutide trial, participants lost around 15% of their body weight. A meaningful portion of that loss was lean mass, not just fat. 🍽️ The issue is not the drug directly causing muscle loss. It is people consuming fewer calories without enough protein or other essential nutrients. 💪 That changes the job food needs to do. When appetite and portion sizes fall, every bite has to work harder. Consumers need more protein, fibre, electrolytes and nutrient density from less food. 🛒 This is already showing up in product development. Morrisons launched 53 GLP-1 friendly products across 400 UK stores. Nestle created Vital Pursuit, a frozen meal brand built around smaller portions and higher protein. 📈 The most telling statistic is that 77% of Vital Pursuit sales come from households where nobody is taking a GLP-1 medication. 🎯 That is the real signal. This is not simply a category for people on weight loss drugs. It is accelerating a broader shift in consumer expectations, more protein, more fibre and more nutrition from less food. 🔬 The ingredients, formats and formulation technologies that solve that challenge will outlast the drug cycle that triggered it. 🌱 Food security and sustainability have long been structural themes in our portfolio thinking. Nutrient density may be the next one and shout outs to startups like Harvest B, FUL Foods, Health Food Symmetry and Haelen Technology who had the foresight to see the tailwinds of the category. #GLP1 #FoodTech #FutureOfFood #NutritionInnovation #FunctionalFoods #ConsumerTrends #AgriFoodInvesting

🥛 This deal is a good reminder of where the real value gets created in foodtech and agtech. Most exits in this sector land mid market, well below the headline numbers you see from consumer tech, which means entry price is the single biggest driver of returns for early investors. Get in cheap enough at seed or Series A and a mid market exit still delivers a strong outcome. Overpay at entry and even a solid trading business selling for a few hundred million barely moves the needle. 🌏 That is exactly why we built Tundra around disciplined entry pricing and a spread across the sector rather than concentrated bets chasing category winners. Agrifood and water technology rarely produce the outlier unicorn exits that justify late stage prices, but they consistently produce these mid market outcomes, the Copras and similar deals across the region. Structuring a portfolio to capture many of these rather than banking on one moonshot is a more repeatable way to generate venture returns in this sector. 🚜 We see this pattern across our own pipeline in Oceania & APAC. Founders building genuinely useful production and supply chain technology can and do get acquired well before they ever need to chase unicorn status, and investors who got in early and priced correctly are the ones who benefit most. It reinforces our approach at Tundra, backing strong fundamentals at sensible valuations across a broad portfolio, rather than paying up for a narrative. #Foodtech #agtech #agrifood #venturecapital #liquidity #exits