Climax Foods Raises $7.5M to Use Data Science to Make Next-Gen Plant-Based Foods That “Outperform”

September 9, 2020

By Lynda Kiernan, Global AgInvesting Media

Data science company Climax Foods has raised $7.5 million in Seed funding to use AI to raise the efficiency of plant-based food production.

This oversubscribed round was backed by At One Ventures, which was founded by GoogleX co-founder Tom Chi, Manta Ray Ventures, S2G Ventures, Valor Siren Ventures, Prelude Ventures, ARTIS Ventures, Index Ventures, Luminous Ventures, Canaccord Genuity Group, Carrot Capital, Global Founders Capital, and multiple aligned angel investors.

“Climax Foods is unlocking a frontier of how expressive we can be with plant-based foods,” said Tom Chi, At One Ventures “They are laying the foundation for a future where healthy, affordable, plant-based foods rival or even surpass the flavor of the animal-based foods they are replacing.”

“Beyond being delicious, the work is crucial for the transition away from unsustainable animal agriculture which drives massive habitat destruction and generates more than 25 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions.”

Driven by the direct need to create a more sustainable food system, Climax Foods is bringing together data science with food science to address the complex challenge of removing animals, which they see as inefficient metabolizers of plants into food, from the food equation.

Founded last year by Harvard astrophysicist Oliver Zahn, who along with two Nobel laureates directed the Center for Cosmological Physics at UC Berkeley and headed Data Science at Google and Impossible Foods, Climax Foods is seeking a more direct path from plant to food product – an evolution that the company equates to the shift from combustion to electric engines.

“We are at a pivotal time where industrialization enabled explosive population growth and consumption of animal products,” said Zahn. “Today, more than 90 percent of all mammalian animals and more than 70 percent of all birds on the planet exist for the sole purpose of metabolizing plants and being turned into food.”

“This industry is complex and wasteful, creating as much climate change as all modes of transportation combined, and using more than a third of the earth’s water and usable land,” continued Zahn. “By speeding up food science innovation, Climax Foods is able to convert plants into equally craveable foods without the environmental impact.”

By exploring and examining at the molecular level what makes animal-based foods so desired, Climax Foods uses a range of computer models, algorithms, and frameworks to crunch hundreds of thousands of combinations of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats – accelerating the formulation process to come up with plant-based foods with the optimum flavor, texture, nutritional profile, and price. 

“Existing efforts in this space have only scratched the surface,” Zahn told Food Navigator – USA. “There are over 100,000 plants and hundreds of them that could be commercially sourced at scale, and many proteins, flavor active compounds, and precursors of flavor active compounds…”

So where will Climax Foods initially be focusing its technology?  On cheese alternatives.

The dairy-free category has been at the tip of the spear for the plant-based dietary shift, however, vegan cheese has proven particularly difficult to formulate – thanks to the challenge of replicating casein – the protein that gives cheese all those characteristics that humans love. But for those that break through the casein issue, it would give them a decided advantage in the vegan cheese market that is estimated to be valued at $2.5 billion by the end of this year. 

“Aged cheese has been a challenging category but the data-driven approach of Climax Foods has created prototypes like nothing I’ve ever tasted on or off the market,” said Leah Volger, Manta Ray Ventures.

Joining Zahn on this mission to completely reinvent our current food system is a cadre of some of the top talent from the food tech industry. Founding members of the company include COO Caroline Love, who previously led sales and operations at JUST and is an associate producer for The Game Changers, a James Cameron Netflix documentary about elite athletes and their plant-based diets.

Also on the team is Pavel Aronov, a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology who worked at UC Davis, Stanford University, and Thernmo Fisher with a focus on advanced scientific instrumentation and its application to food, health, and nutrition. In his role at Climax Foods, Aronov will lead chemistry and analytics to identify what drives taste and flavor on a molecular level in new food products. 

“Climax Foods is tackling the same opportunity to change the market and the food system, but they are doing it with an entirely novel technological approach,” said Sanjeev Krishnan, CIO, S2G Ventures – one of the top plant-based investors and backer of Beyond Meat.

“They are using data science to produce a new category of foods that will not merely compete with, but has the potential to out-compete, traditional proteins in terms of taste, nutritional density, and price. The machine intelligence approach Climax Foods is pioneering is critical for harnessing the vast number of ways raw ingredients and natural processes can be used to create the ultimate digital recipes.”

 

– Lynda Kiernan is editor with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, and HighQuest Group’s Oilseed & Grain News. She is also a contributor to the GAI GazetteShe can be reached at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.com

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