Another Israeli company from the wave of tech flotations on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) in 2021 has reached the end of the road as an independent business. Food-tech company NextFerm Technologies Ltd. announced this week that it is suspending operations, except for a joint venture in India. Following the announcement, the company's share price plunged 50%, giving it a market cap of NIS 7 million, a fall of 99.5% since its IPO.
NextFerm notified the TASE that following a decision by the board of directors, the company's 11 employees had been informed of the suspension and that management will act to realize the company's assets and technologies to reduce commitments, as far as possible to keep the company's activity as a "going concern."
NextFerm's board of directors have instructed management to seek a buyer for the company's activity including efforts to find a buyer with or without the company's activity. The company has only $230,000 in cash against commitments of $1.45 million, including day-to-day commitments totaling $1.14 million.
Production of food ingredients in yeast without genetic engineering
NextFerm was founded by Boaz Noy, Dr. Tzafra Cohen and Yossi Peled, all former employees of Enzymotec, the foodtech company sold to Frutarom in 2017 for $210 million. NextFerm has developed technology to create food ingredients in yeast without genetic engineering.
NextFerm's lead product is a vegan protein produced in yeast. The company has produced several dozen tons of the product and claims in its reports that there has been a lot of interest in it from food and nutritional supplement companies worldwide. However, the operation was loss-making, and expanding production capacity to achieve economies of scale has not been possible without additional investments.
One of the things that attracted investors to NextFerm's IPO in January 2021 was the existence of two additional products, which were supposed to diversify its risks and bring it cash until the main product matures. One of them was a yeast-based baking improvement product that was licensed. Marketing was sold to one of the leading companies in the field, but revenue were not significant, and licensing was terminated in 2024. NextFerm also developed and marketed a food supplement that was sold in the US and Canada, but due to the difficulty in raising resources, it was unable to invest in proving its clinical efficacy or in its marketing.
NextFerm's revenue last year was only $174,000, compared with $283,000 in 2023. Last year's loss was $5.3 million, and in total the company has "burned" $37 million since its founding.
NextFerm therefore decided in 2024 to lay off most of its then several dozen employees to cut expenses to $2 million a year, while maintaining its cooperation in the yeast field with Indian partner Kothari, which is responsible for production and marketing of the product with revenue shared equally. This cooperation should allow the company to exist, with expenses of about $2 million a year.
In the report published this week, NextFerm explained that it was unable to sell equipment valued at $900,000, and had therefore reached its current decision, "Due to the ongoing difficulty in raising financing to continue the company's operations."
NextFerm CEO Boaz Noy told "Globes," "We, the company's managers and employees, believe in the product and the technology, but the food-tech field requires much more investment and time than we can muster. Now our plan is aimed at a very limited activity that can be profitable quickly. The food market is already there, but the capital market is not, and the situation is not particularly helpful. We are trying to find solutions, and if there are any, we will report on them."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on April 2, 2025.
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