Mylla receives funding to expand its farm-to-table digital marketplace

Food shortages and rapid price increases due to the pandemic showed how Europe urgently needs to start producing, selling, and consuming food differently.

Today, Swedish food startup Mylla raised a disclosed amount to help transform food buying from small-scale farmers and growers. 

The company is building a digital marketplace for selling and distributing food directly from farm to table. 

For farmers and smaller food producers who choose to invest in quality and promote biodiversity, reaching the shelves in European grocery stores is difficult. At the same time, consumers are willing to buy directly from the farmers.

The founders of Mylla are farmer Jens Thulin and tech veteran Andreas Arledal, and they are building a food chain with fewer links and intermediaries. 

This enables a larger part of the profits to go to the producer while keeping the price down for the end consumer.

The food industry is Sweden's third largest industry, a cornerstone of the Swedish economy, and one of Sweden's most geographically dispersed industries. In 2021, it had a turnover of SEK 200 billion, employed 55,000 people and exported a value of SEK 65 billion.

Swedish VC BackingMinds is leading the undisclosed funding, which also includes tech entrepreneur and APSIS founder Anders Frankel. 

Susanne Najafi, Founding Partner of investment firm BackingMinds shared: 

"Driven by consumers' growing interest in organically produced food, legislation promoting traceability and biodiversity, and producers seeking scalable and automated distribution, we at BackingMinds have for some time been looking for an investment in a technology platform where local producers can reach out with their fresh produce directly to the consumer.
 
We are convinced that Mylla will play a key role in meeting the growing group of conscious consumers, promoting local small producers and increasing the degree of self-sufficiency in Sweden and the rest of Europe."

The investment will help roll out Mylla nationally in Sweden, with ambitions of a European rollout in the coming years.

Lead image via Mylla. Photo: Uncredited.