- Climax Foods, a data science company that is innovating the future of food, announced recently it has raised $7.5 million in seed funding to create a smarter and simpler way to make food by converting plants, with less processing.
Climax Foods, a data science company that is innovating the future of food, announced it has raised $7.5 million in seed funding to create a smarter and simpler way to make food by converting plants, with less processing, into products with the same or better taste as animal-based products at a price point accessible to everyone.
Due to the urgency to create a more sustainable food system and the risk of future pandemics caused by pathogens making the leap to humans from animals used for food, Climax Foods is intersecting data science and food science to solve the complex problem of removing animals from the food system by creating a more direct path from plants to products. And by examining at the molecular level what makes animal products craveable, the company will answer how plants can be optimally used to replace unsustainable diets currently centered around animals.
Climax Foods is aiming to make products that are smarter and safer for consumers than their animal-based predecessors. And to unlock the full potential of plants, an infinite number of ways to combine the hundreds of thousands of plant sources would need to be investigated. To simplify this immense task, Climax Foods has created sophisticated machine learning frameworks to unlock all that plants naturally have to offer. The seed round will provide capital to fuel deep research in taste, flavor, texture, and nutrition of the most desired animal-based food categories, starting with cheese.
Investors in this round include At One Ventures, founded by visionary GoogleX co-founder Tom Chi, as well as Manta Ray Ventures, S2G Ventures, Valor Siren Ventures, Prelude Ventures, ARTIS Ventures, Index Ventures, Luminous Ventures, Canaccord Genuity Group, Carrot Capital and Global Founders Capital. The oversubscribed seed round also includes several mission-aligned angel investors.
The new company brings together heavy talent from across the food and technology industries. CEO Oliver Zahn, PhD, studied astrophysics at Harvard, and together with two Nobel laureates directed the Center for Cosmological Physics at UC Berkeley. Most recently, Zahn headed Data Science efforts at Google and Impossible Foods.
Founding members of the company also include industry veteran Caroline Love, Chief Operating Officer, who previously led sales and operations at JUST. She is also an associate producer on the James Cameron documentary streaming on Netflix The Game Changers about the world’s top athletes fueling their victories through plant-based eating.
Joining the company from Impossible Foods, Pavel Aronov will lead chemistry and analytics to define what supercharges taste and flavor in new products on a molecular level. Aronov earned his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and worked at UC Davis, Stanford University, and Thermo Fisher focused on advanced scientific instrumentation and its applications to food, health and nutrition.
KEY QUOTES:
“We are at a pivotal time where industrialization enabled explosive population growth and consumption of animal products. Today, more than 90% of all mammalian animals and more than 70% 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. By speeding up food science innovation, Climax Foods is able to convert plants into equally craveable foods without the environmental impact.”
— Oliver Zahn, CEO of Climax Foods
“Climax Foods is unlocking a frontier of how expressive we can be with plant-based foods. 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% of total greenhouse gas emissions.”
— Tom Chi of At One Ventures
“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. 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.”
— Sanjeev Krishnan, one of the largest investors in the plant protein space and Chief Investment Officer of S2G Ventures — which invested in Beyond Meat, one of the most successful IPOs of 2019
“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.”
— Leah Volger from Manta Ray Ventures
