Intelligence agencies don't usually worry about broccoli. Yet in January 2026, the UK government published a national security assessment produced with the Joint Intelligence Committee, Britain's top intelligence body, which sets priorities for MI5 and MI6. Its launch had been pulled before for being too alarming.

The newly identified national security risk: biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse. Closer to home, 59% of England's best farmland already lies in flood risk zones (Environment Agency).

→ Agricultural sourcing has become a matter of national security.

And the companies that buy from agriculture need a new kind of tooling to deal with it. That is why we invested in Finches.

Vanagon has co-led the €2 million pre-seed round of Finches together with High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), alongside Bayern Kapital, UnternehmerTUM Funding for Innovators and angels from the food industry and tech.

In the UK alone, two striking sources arrive at the same place:

→ The government assessment judges that without major gains in resilience, the UK cannot maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food. Around 40% of its food is imported.

→ A memo published in April 2025 by senior food-industry professionals states: what was a long-term threat is now a short-term threat. Companies analyze sourcing data in isolation and cannot forecast across regions. TCFD, TNFD and CSRD reporting is compliance work, yet it is often presented to boards and investors as adequate risk mitigation.

This summer showed what that looks like in practice. In late July, British growers went back to Spain for leafy greens and broccoli, at a time of year when these crops normally come from British fields. Across Europe, the forecast for the EU and UK grain harvest was cut by 16.7 million tons between June and September, with French corn down 45% (ECIU, based on COCERAL data).

And it is not just a dry year. According to World Weather Attribution, climate change made the heat-driven drying of western Europe's soils this spring about 80 times more likely. Rainfall deficits that farms used to ride out now turn into drought. Or, as the Finches founders put it: the same rain doesn't grow the same crop anymore.

The pattern is global: the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) counts 7 of 9 planetary boundaries crossed, all on a worsening trend.

Yet for sourcing, there is a lever: the signals of a sourcing collapse exist months in advance. They are just spread across data silos, in ERP systems and spreadsheets, phone calls and WhatsApp photos, and in the heads of a few agronomists.

Finches brings these signals together into an AI early-warning system for agricultural sourcing.

→ The platform combines a company's supplier, acreage and contract data with weather, satellite, pest and market data, hyper-local news and agronomist field reports.

→ Buyers get a warning weeks before a shortfall, with affected regions, suppliers and concrete alternatives. That gives them time to talk to their growers early: adjust volumes, shift delivery dates, line up a second supplier or protect the crop still in the field.

→ Live since September 2026. Early customers include a leading organic baby food manufacturer and a North American Fortune 500 food group.

The new capital goes into product and sales. On the product side, that means linking raw materials to recipes and finished products, checking origins against organic and other standards, and bringing production plans and costs into the picture. On the sales side, it means expanding from food & beverage into pharma and cosmetics.

→ Catharina van Delden (CEO) built innosabi into Europe's leading innovation management platform, acquired in 2021 by IP software group Questel. Finches began on her family's farm in Uruguay, during the country's worst drought in decades.

→ Dr. Stefanie Glenn (CTO) holds a Cambridge PhD in genetics and held engineering and leadership roles in enterprise AI, Google and BMW Group.

→ Alexandra Vázquez Bea (CFO/COO) was previously CFO/COO at Oetker Digital and led the IPO of Veganz Group AG.

If you know food, ingredient, pharma or cosmetics companies that depend on agricultural raw materials and would benefit from earlier warnings, please reach out to Susanne or directly to Catharina at [email protected].

Read more

👉 Our LinkedIn post on the investment.
👉 The Finches founders on the round: The same rain doesn't grow the same crop anymore

Fitting the topic: next week, as part of Munich Climate Week, we're hosting our Rooftop Investors Lunch at the Deutsches Museum. Alongside Finches, three more of our portfolio founders will be on stage:

→ Dr. Sonja Stuchtey, Co-Founder, The Landbanking Group: Nature as an asset class
→ Barbara Bachus, ExoMatter: Rethinking materials development
→ Bosse Rothe, Holy Technologies: Bringing high-performance manufacturing back to Europe
→ Catharina van Delden, Co-Founder & CEO, Finches: AI sourcing in new realities

They'll show what it looks like when nature, materials and manufacturing become part of Europe's competitiveness story.

DeepTech, Nature & Competitiveness: what makes economic sense
📅 Tue, 20 October 2026 | 12:00–15:00
📍 Deutsches Museum, Munich

"Climate change and the nature crisis? Real. But we can't afford climate action right now." Among investors, these voices are getting louder again.

Next week, we will take a closer look, with a small circle of investors, founders and changemakers:

→ Can we still afford to transform our economy with the planet in mind?
→ How do we stay competitive globally, and how do we win back industries we have lost to other regions?
→ What is our economy's most important infrastructure, and how can we manage it?
→ What is the next subprime crisis, and how can we prepare?

And of course: what role DeepTech from Germany plays in all of this.

Format: Short impulses. Lunch. Plenty of time to connect.

👉 More information on the event page: https://luma.com/rcm92p9z

Warm regards, Axel, Sandro & Susanne