Today, food waste fighter Orbisk announced to be have received €2.4 million from the European Commission’s European Innovation Council (EIC). The company will use the funding for scaling up their business internationally and further enhancing the technology.
Orbisk is one of 65 companies that have been awarded a grant from the EIC Accelerator today. The ECI accelerator provides grant funding and investments to young companies to accelerate their development and scale up their cutting-edge innovations. Only top-class game-changers in the tech space are considered for the program. The EIC grant follows shortly after a recent 1 million euro seed funding round by Orbisk.
“It fulfills our dream of saving food at the scale of millions of kilos per year!”
Olaf van der Veen, CEO and founder of Orbisk, commented on the EIC grant: “All of us are honored to be acknowledged for our proprietary fundamental work. I’m beyond proud of the team for their effort and persistence, and our early stage clients for their trust in bringing the product to where it is today. In particular through the hardships all of us dealt with in COVID times. The support is pushing our company into the next stage where our technology can truly effectuate its impact at scale, fulfilling our dream of saving food at the scale of millions of kilos per year!”
Saving 100+ million kilogram food waste annually
Founded in 2019 with the support of StartLife, Orbisk is a startup that provides professional kitchens the ability to reduce their food waste stream by up to 70% with its fully automated food waste monitoring service. With the collected data, customers can adapt and optimize their entire food process, save thousands of kilos per year (worth tens of thousands of euros), and realize a net operating margin increase of 2-5% and over.
By making life easier, more sustainable, and more profitable for customers, Orbisk will be fighting food waste at scale, saving over 100M kilograms of food waste annually in professional kitchens by 2025.
“Binspector”
Orbisk has won the EIC Accelerator pitch with a proposal under the acronym ‘Binspector’. Within the project, Orbisk will invest in the international scalability of operations and dynamic AI models for further increased accuracy and rapid adaptation in international cuisines. Also, further research and deployment of consumption prospecting algorithms will be put in place, creating a truly smart assistant that predicts the amount of food that needs to be purchased, alleviating the time-consuming and tedious daily task of purchase planning.
Meet Orbisk in Las Vegas or Amsterdam
Orbisk will be exhibiting at the CES technology fair in Las Vegas on 5-8 January 2022 as part of the Dutch trade mission that was also presented today; as well as at the Horecava in Amsterdam on 10-13 January 2022. If you’re there, make sure to pay them a visit. Of course you can also visit their website and set up an appointment.