Italian deeptech startup Ganiga has closed a €1.5 million equity round, Tech.eu reports. The round was led by the Italian contract catering company Vivenda. London-based NextSTEP and three angel investors also took part. Ganiga had already secured €1 million through Smart&Start Italia, an incentive programme managed by Invitalia, so its total funding now stands at €2.5 million. The €2.5 million in some headlines is that combined figure, not the size of the equity round.
What Ganiga sells
Ganiga, founded in the province of Pisa by Nicolas Zeoli, combines AI, computer vision and robotics for waste management. It began with robotic waste-sorting devices that identify and separate waste types. According to the report, it has sold more than 300 of them to airports, shopping centres and large businesses in Italy, Japan, Australia and other European countries.
The food-waste product, HooolyFood, builds on data collected from those deployments. Cameras mounted above waste containers identify what food is being thrown away, with no weighing needed. A data platform brings the readings from all devices into one dashboard. There, operators can analyse waste patterns, estimate costs and monitor how full containers are. The company says the product was built in under a year and is already used in operations serving more than 30,000 meals a day.
Where the money goes
Ganiga plans to expand its technical and commercial teams, develop HooolyFood and the data platform further, and increase recurring revenue. It will start with contract catering alongside Vivenda, then move to event catering, hotels and other food-service settings. It is also working on automating ingredient ordering and menu planning, and on sensors for existing containers that would monitor municipal and other waste streams. The source describes these as in development.
The regulatory backdrop
The article ties the round to EU rules that set binding food-waste reduction targets for 2030. It cites Eurostat's figure of about 58 million tonnes of food waste generated in the EU in 2023. Zeoli's argument is that a binding target requires measurement: for a canteen, knowing which dishes are wasted and why gives it data for purchasing, menu planning and service delivery.
What is not in the source
The report gives no pricing, no contract terms and no customer results beyond the meal volume. The investors' stakes and the valuation are also not disclosed.