Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Research Grant

In November 2012, Apeel was founded with a $100k research grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help reduce post-harvest food waste in developing countries that lacked refrigeration infrastructure. With this funding, Apeel’s founder James Rogers hired two researchers he knew from his Ph.D program and commenced working on the product that ultimately would become Apeel. While the product was originally focused on assisting farmers in Africa and Asia, it expanded to food preservation in the Western Hemisphere. Apeel has since been recognized as one of the first food waste “unicorn” companies (greater than $1B in valuation), having raised more than $300M in total funding in order to continue research and development development and to scale globally.