Austrian Kern Tec raises €12m in Series A financing

Food tech specialist Kern Tec GmbH (Vienna) will use €12m from a €12m Series financing to scale up manufacturing of dairy products from upcycled stone fruit pits. The company uses the 500,000 metric tons of land-filled apricot, plum and cherry pits in Europe to extract oils and proteins from the seeds and produce plant-based milk, yoghurt and cheese from it. Telos Impact led the financing, with participation from the PeakBridge Growth 2 fund and the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund. Additionally, the company has secured significant local and international grants.

Luca Fichtinger, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Kern Tec, comments: “This investment will
accelerate our global scaling capabilities and enable more products to the market that are derived
from the valuable stone fruit seeds. This will scale our impact of reducing waste, whilst unlocking
further growth in the plant-based dairy industry”.

At Kern Tec, a set of new technologies and supply chains have been developed to turn the seeds from stone fruit pits into B2B ingredients for dairy alternative applications such as milk, yoghurt, ice cream and cheese. With having successfully processed over 2.500 tons of fruit pits in their Austrian production facility, the company now enters the growth stage scaling the whole value chain and their global customer base. The company was founded in 2019 by Michael Beitl, Luca Fichtinger, Sebastian Jeschko and Fabian Wagesreither.