Internship summary:
- Nutreco NuFrontiers (Nutreco’s strategic innovation and investment division) is looking for an entrepreneurial university student to help set-up and structure its start-up investing activity.
- Main tasks are identifying relevant start-ups, screening potential investments and optimizing the structure of the lead flow / funnel management platform
- Internship period is April to July 2018, location is Amersfoort
Nutreco NuFrontiers is the strategic innovation and investment division of Nutreco, a global leader in animal nutrition and aquaculture feed.
We invest in:
- start-ups and scale-ups in new technologies, ingredients, or formulations that can benefit Nutreco’s other two divisions, Trouw Nutrition (animal nutrition) and Skretting (aquaculture feed)
- joint-ventures with partners to create ‘moon shot projects’ that address major bottlenecks in the feed and food value chain, related to biology, sustainability, welfare and other major challenges requiring specialists from different industries to join resources
Key themes we are interested in:
- Animal nutrition, incl. health-oriented functional nutrition, early life nutrition and precision nutrition
- Precision farming, alternative sustainable farming systems and digital applications
- Alternative proteins for feed and food
Project background
Nutreco NuFrontiers has only been established recently and its small and entrepreneurial team is now in the process of setting up operations in a structured way. An important part of our activities is managing lead- and deal flow: identifying and investigating the most innovative and promising start-ups to identify potential deals and partnership opportunities.
Over the last years, we created a large database of start-ups and scale-ups, growing every month by 50-100 new leads. Most of these companies are early stage. They are evolving very quickly: developing, merging, changing focus or disappearing.
NuFrontiers is using a web-based platform to organize its leads and deal flow. This platform, maintained by one of our partners, is yet to be optimized and populated with the most relevant leads out of our existing database to increase its value in the deal making process.
Internship
This internship is a unique opportunity for an entrepreneurial student to get introduced to the rapidly evolving agricultural start-up space and to learn about animal protein production and start-up investing.
The Intern will be trained to identify relevant start-ups / scale-ups based on education we provide on our industry and key investment themes. She / he will screen potential investments and assess them for relevance for NuFrontiers.
The Intern will work with our partners to optimize the structure of the platform according to our needs. This includes organizing the platform as the best basis for our internal processes: funnel management, structuring leads and investment themes, and labelling / updating relevant information on start-ups.
The intern will input into the platform the leads validated by our team further to her / his research using the past and recent leads present in the NuFrontiers’ database. If the team decides to engage with the companies identified by the Intern, the Intern will be involved in the process potentially leading to investment or partnership.
Profile
- Student at a University in the Netherlands (open to both Bachelor and Master students)
- Preferred academic background in Life Sciences (e.g. biology, biotechnology, animal sciences, etc.) and/or business studies
- Background / affinity with animal farming and food production is an advantage
- Background / affinity with entrepreneurship, start-ups and (venture capital) investing is an advantage
- English speaking
- Pro-active, pragmatic, solution-oriented, hands-on
If interested, please apply here.
