Israeli compostable packaging firm Tipa nabs $70m investment
Award-winning company makes eco-friendly packaging for food and goods to reduce plastic waste
Ricky Ben-David is a Times of Israel editor and reporter
Israeli company Tipa, an award-winning developer of compostable packaging solutions for food and goods, has nabbed a $70 million investment, the firm announced on Sunday.
Founded in 2010, Tipa makes compostable packaging for fresh and dry food and for goods like apparel using a patent-protected method and a blend of compostable polymers. The company says its eco-friendly films and laminates emulate the properties and functionality of conventional plastic materials like durability, barrier properties, shelf stability. The material can decompose into soil after about 180 days, the company says, compared to about 1,000 years for plastic bags.
The Series C funding round was led by Israeli investment company Meitav Dash and Millennium Food Tech, an R&D investment partnership traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. Millennium invests in Israeli food tech and agricultural tech companies and has backed outfits like plant-based burger company SavorEat, cultivated meat startup Aleph Farms, and Yofix, a maker of soy-free, plant-based prebiotic and probiotic dairy alternatives.
Migdal Group Insurance and Finance also participated in Tipa’s funding round.
Tipa has raised over $130 million since it was founded in 2010 in the central town of Hod Hasharon by entrepreneurs Daphna Nissenbaum and Tal Neuman. The company’s investors have included food tech-focused impact fund Blue Horizon Ventures, GreenSoil Investments, and Horizon Ventures, the Hong Kong-based private investment company of business magnate Ka-shing Li.
The company aims to address the environmental harms posed by the flexible plastic packaging industry for consumer goods, a market that is projected to reach about $200 billion by 2025. But just about 4% of flexible plastic packaging is recycled, and Tipa has positioned itself to offer an environmentally friendly, fully compostable alternative to reduce waste.
The company has said that packaging “should be part of a circular economy, where materials that are produced can be reused for another valuable purpose,” adding that its packaging solution “biodegrades into nourishing compost, leaving behind the same nutrients left by organic waste.”
Tipa already works with a number of companies worldwide like fashion brands Scotch & Soda and Stella McCartney, and UK supermarket chain Waitrose. This summer, the company inked a deal with Swiss global packaging company Amcor, one of the largest in the world, to manufacture its compostable packaging in Australia and New Zealand.
“We are witnessing a growing enthusiasm around the world for the compostable packaging agenda and the solutions it brings,” Nissenbaum said in July. “Where recycling falls short with being unable to recover flexible films and packaging contaminated with food, compostable packaging can rise up and take on the challenge. We are counting on brands to recognize the consumer demand for compostable packaging.”
Tipa has nabbed a number of accolades in recent years. In 2019, it was named to the World Economic Forum’s “Technology Pioneers” list and won an award that same year in the FT/IFC Transformational Business Awards in London, the impact-driven awards program established by World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, and the Financial Times.
The company operates in a growing Israeli climate tech sector that drew more than $2.2 billion in investments over the course of 2021. Climate tech is an umbrella term that includes technologies for clean energy, transportation, water treatment, food manufacturing, waste reduction, and supply chain improvements.
