A food technology company that creates animal-free fats using synthetic biology has secured $28.6 million in Series A funding led by Horizons Ventures and backed by Main Sequence Ventures and Hostplus.
We previously profiled the Australian company as earning $11 million by 2021. It is one of the few companies in the food technology sector focused on developing fats and oils that make alternative proteins smell, taste and cook better than traditional meat.
Creating that flavor equation is one of the challenges facing alternative protein makers, James Petrie, co-founder and CEO of Nourish Ingredients, told TechCrunch.
“I think the heat has gone out of the market, which is the main reason we exist, because our view is that these foods can be improved,” he said. You won’t see a market boom until you improve. Not only are you reaching out to vegans and vegetarians, but you’re also reaching out to meat eaters and getting them to come back to the foods. This is our mission.
For Nourish, he needed to reach a wide variety of customers. People “realized that they were trying to fit these elements into a square hole,” he said. Instead, the company developed proprietary fermentation methods that can mass-produce fat molecules to yield alternative proteins that have the taste, smell and flavor of animal meat, Petrie added.
Including the new capital infusion, Nourish has raised a total of about $40 million and raised its valuation, though Petrie declined to disclose the exact price. The CEO said the company wants to achieve some internal milestones before the new funding, including getting to the point of translating science into product validation.
After infusing the product into foods, the company is getting the desired culinary results. Now he is working sober. Petrie plans to use the new funds to continue that production and further product development.
Those next R&D and scaling steps include forming alliances with universities, including the University of California at Riverside. Australian National Science Agency, CSIRO; University of Nottingham, UK; and Deakin University. In addition, the company is collaborating with the University of Queensland to accelerate the production of next-generation foods in Australia.
By 2023, Petrie expects to introduce its first oil product into alternative protein product lines and specialty foods.
“We are still doing R&D and have a product pipeline,” he added. “We also need to accelerate the transformation of our MVP so that we have a realistic scale where people can actually do something meaningful with it.”
