AKA Foods has closed a $17.2 million seed funding round led by noted AI entrepreneurs Alex and Michael Bronstein, marking the official debut of AKA Studio, a secure AI system designed to accelerate and modernize product development for global food companies. The financing represents a notable early investment in a platform that aims to redefine how food is researched, formulated, and commercialized by integrating organisational knowledge, sensory evaluation, and advanced AI assistants into a unified environment.
Headquartered in Amstelveen, Netherlands, AKA Foods has developed a system that consolidates a company’s historical and ongoing research into a structured and secure foundation. The platform incorporates experimental and analytical sensory measurements related to texture, aroma, and taste, sourced from dedicated sensory research facilities, before applying AI assistants to guide product formulation and optimisation. This approach aims to transform processes that have traditionally required years of trial and error into scientifically informed development cycles lasting only weeks.
Research and development teams can unify ingredient specifications, sensory responses, regulatory documentation, and legacy experimentation into one intelligent framework. Executives gain new visibility into organisational knowledge that can be quantified and applied to productivity gains, competitive advantage and profitability. For investors, the company positions AKA Studio as a defensible platform at the intersection of AI and food science, strengthened by its integration of human sensory evaluation as a core component.
While product formulation will continue to require scientific expertise, AKA Foods highlights that the platform accelerates decision-making, improves accuracy, and enables the creation of healthier and more sustainable products. It also supports reformulation efforts for clean-label initiatives, reduced sugar and fat content and improved supply chain resilience. By linking structured data with sensory evidence, companies can refine products with increased precision while maintaining secure control of their proprietary information.
Security remains a foundational element of the system. AKA Studio operates as a secure SaaS platform that provides private data environments for each client. For companies with heightened confidentiality requirements, the platform can be deployed on-premise in an air-gapped configuration while maintaining the same security standards. Client data is never shared or incorporated into model training, and it remains wholly owned and controlled by the organization.
The sensory-AI framework is designed with extensibility in mind, opening pathways for future applications in adjacent sectors such as flavour, fragrance, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. Each of these industries relies on precision formulation and rigorous sensory evaluation, areas in which AKA Foods believes its platform can provide unique value.
With the seed round complete, the company plans to expand enterprise deployment worldwide and continue advancing the scientific foundations of data-driven food innovation through its proprietary architecture. AKA Studio is positioned as a new industry standard that aligns research teams, executives and investors around measurable scientific and commercial progress.
KEY QUOTES
“AKA Foods is essentially bringing to market a new type of a grammar; a language for food, creating AI agents that are capable of connecting to different external data sources and then making recommendations on how to improve the recipe. This is something that a generic AI model like ChatGPT will never be able to achieve.”
Professor Alex Bronstein, Chief Scientist at AKA Foods; Head of the Center for Intelligent Systems at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology; Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria
“The global food industry holds enormous amounts of valuable knowledge but struggles to use it effectively. AKA Studio gives companies the ability to capture, organise and apply that knowledge securely. This investment allows us to expand deployment to enterprise clients worldwide and continue advancing the science behind how food is created.”
David Sack, Founder & CEO of AKA Foods
