Proxy Foods AI has raised $6 million in seed funding to expand its artificial intelligence platform for food and beverage research and development. The round was led by Ted Leonsis, founder, chairman, managing partner and CEO of Monumental Sports & Entertainment, with lead participation from Robert G. Hisaoka and SWaN & Legend Venture Partners.
The company plans to use the funding to expand its food science, regulatory and commercialization capabilities and grow its enterprise customer base globally.
Proxy Foods AI provides an agentic AI platform designed to help food manufacturers, ingredient suppliers and restaurant companies move products from concept through formulation and commercialization.
Customers include Barilla, Gefsinus and CAVA. Proxy Foods AI also works with MISTA, an innovation platform owned by Givaudan, and previously won a Demo Day competition at Tyson Foods.
The company said its average platform customer generates more than $1 billion in annual revenue.
Proxy Foods AI uses institutional knowledge from disconnected files and previous research projects to predict formulation performance before physical benchtop trials begin.
Customers have reduced the number of product-development iterations by up to 80%, lowered cost of goods by 2% to 10% during reformulations and compressed prototype timelines from months to days.
The platform is designed to help companies develop products that meet several requirements simultaneously, including higher protein content, lower cost, cleaner labels, allergen restrictions, longer shelf life, regional sourcing and regulatory compliance.
Proxy Foods AI has also established research collaborations with Stanford University and Food System Innovations.
That work produced product-optimization models based on Expert Guided Bayesian Optimization, which the company said achieved near-perfect matching of sensory characteristics.
The company is also participating in a Good Food Institute-backed project with the Federal University of Paraná and McGill University focused on AI-driven cell culture media for cultivated meat.
A partnership with Aperio Global adds a zero-trust, quantum-resilient security layer designed to support computation on encrypted data without exposing proprietary formulations.
Other investors in Proxy Foods AI include Jeff Skoll, Roger Ferguson Jr., Michelle Freeman, Grant Verstandig and several food, technology and financial industry executives.
KEY QUOTES:
“Leading food and beverage companies leverage our platform to create a new R&D environment, where teams are empowered by technology to fully use their creative capacity, quickly reimagine legacy products, open up new categories, and deliver better taste, nutrition and affordability.”
Panos Kostopoulos, CEO of Proxy Foods AI
“Proxy Foods AI is applying innovative technology to one of the world’s largest and most essential industries in a way that is practical, measurable and built for scale.”
Ted Leonsis, Co-Founder and Lead Board Director of Proxy Foods AI
