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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Shiru

‘Amazon for Proteins’: Shiru Launches AI-Powered Marketplace for Proteins

Shiru, a company that utilizes AI to discover plant-based novel proteins, has announced a new marketplace in ProteinDiscovery.ai that lets anyone search, discover, pilot, and buy molecules for food, agriculture, personal care, and advanced material applications.

Shiru claims that its protein marketplace is an industry first. It allows researchers and product builders access to a database of 33 million-plus molecules and search via sequence, functional use, and expression.

“With ProteinDiscovery.ai we’ve made the world of natural proteins for industrial applications accessible. We’ve even added the ability for users to easily purchase samples, creating the ‘Amazon for proteins,’” said Shiru Founder and CEO Dr. Jasmin Hume. “We’ve been using AI to identify high-value, novel, scalable proteins for years, fueling our own product development. With significant recent interest from CPGs and ingredients companies alike, we decided to open our toolbox to everyone.”

I caught up with Hume to learn how the new protein discovery engine works. You can watch the video of our conversation below.

The Spoon Talks With Shiru About New Protein Discovery Marketplace

Want to Try AI-Powered Cheese & Sausage? Join Us on October 25th at the Food AI Summit

So, what does food designed by AI taste like?

Next week at the Food AI Summit, you’ll have a chance to find out! That’s because not only will we have sessions by founders, inventors, and executives exploring how to bring food to our plates using the latest in artificial intelligence, but we’ll also get a chance to taste it!

After a full day of sessions that includes leaders from Pepsi, Afresh, ReFED, Chefman, Innit, Mineral and more, we’ll network and sample food from Shiru and Climax Foods! The founders of both companies will be on hand to talk about the process behind developing AI-powered plant-based food, so you will definitely want to stick around and join us!

You can check out the full-day agenda and great list of speakers over at the Food AI Summit page. If you’d like to join us, use the coupon code SPOON at checkout for $100 off tickets.

We’ll see you next week!

Shiru Used AI To Discover Its First Novel Ingredient in 3 Months. The Next One Will Go Even Faster

This week, novel ingredient discovery startup Shiru announced they have commercially launched their first ingredient, OleoPro, a plant-based fat ingredient the company says doesn’t have the environmental costs or health consequences of animal fat. As part of the announcement, the company disclosed that the company’s first commercial partner is Griffith Foods, a commercial food ingredient manufacturer.

As readers of The Spoon know, Shiru is part of a cohort of startups using AI to discover new ingredients more quickly than traditional methods. Unlike many first-generation synthetic bio products, OleoPro was developed using machine learning, enabling a multifold acceleration of the discovery and testing phase according to the company.

The company’s discovery timeframe for OleoPro took less than three months. According to the announcement, “Shiru’s biochemists and computational biologists used AI to scan and select nearly 10,000 formulations” in that time frame, and “then they determined the precise molecules that would combine to form an ingredient with the unique oil-holding protein scaffold of animal fat.” The entire discovery and commercialization process took 18 months from the project’s start, much shorter than the multi-year process typical of classical synthetic biology workflows.

And now, according to Shiru CEO Jasmin Hume, that time frame for discovery will compress even more now that the company has built out its machine learning model. Finding a new novel protein or functional ingredient will take “eight to 10 weeks is like what we’re comfortable with,” Hume told me in a recent interview. “And what that means is, it’s not just digital, but at eight weeks, we have up to half a dozen proteins that we’re making at a couple of grams. And so we go from totally digital to pilot-produced ingredients, not one but a couple that can work, in about eight weeks.”

“Instead of a half decade and more than a quarter billion dollars in R&D to ship a viable product, Shiru used AI to dramatically reduce the cost and time to market of an essential ingredient of plant-based meat to a matter of months and a few hundred thousand dollars – and the cost of protein discovery at Shiru continues to decline,” said Dr. Ranjani Varadan, Shiru Chief Scientific Officer, in the announcement. Varadan, who sat down with The Spoon last summer, was previously VP of R&D at Impossible Foods.

Food Tech Founders Navigate Turbulence of SVB Collapse & Subsequent Fed Intervention

If you’ve ever traveled overseas when big news happens at home, it can feel disorienting.

I felt that to a certain degree last week when The Spoon team was in Europe to attend the HIP conference in Spain and to travel to the Basque Culinary Center. Like many of you, I was trying to keep on top of the news about SVB’s collapse and wondering whether the bank’s collapse would lead to a 2008-like contagion, but all the while doing so from a different time zone and a foreign country.

But that feeling of discombobulation was no doubt minor compared to what many food tech founders felt as they tried to figure out what all this meant to their companies. Many were directly impacted by having the bulk of their funds sitting in SVB accounts, and I watched updates on Twitter, Linkedin, and other social channels as founders communicated in real-time as they navigated the impending financial crisis.

One of those companies was Omsom, a fast-growing CPG brand founded by sisters Vanessa and Kim Pham to deliver Asian flavor mixes to consumers via DTC channels. The company published an open letter via Instagram late last week to explain how they were processing the crisis and to appeal for help from their customers.

“Silicon Valley Bank collapsed yesterday in the second largest bank failure in American history — and they were our bank,” they wrote. “This is an open letter from our founders on what happens next + how you can help 🙏🏽.”

Like many founders, they were filled with trepidation about the coming week before the Fed, US Treasury, and the FDIC announced their plans for dealing with the crisis.

Shiru’s Jasmin Hume of Shiru not only felt the confusion a founder must feel when hit with this kind of news but, like me, was trying to navigate the news while traveling overseas. She documented how she was dealing with the crisis while traveling in Japan en route to Spain on her Linkedin:

The past few days have been exhausting learning and responding to SVB’s collapse while in Japan on business. The next few days won’t be any easier, and thinking about them sort of takes my breath away:

Today I’m flying to Spain where I have an 18 hour stop to pick up my 10 month old son who’s been there with family. During the stop I need to work with my team to navigate and act on anything affecting Shiru given whatever SVB updates are on Monday. Monday we’re also announcing a huge, regularly scheduled, milestone for Shiru (more on that soon!). On Tuesday I fly to SF with my son (something like 4 flights, around 30 h traveling combined over the next 2 days across 17 time zones – half of that with a baby). Then back in the office in Alameda Wednesday for 5 on site visits and tastings with investors/partners followed by a speaking engagement at Future Food-Tech Thursday and more conference stuff Friday. All this while helping a very jet-lagged baby re-adjust to his home in Oakland.

Stateside, many future food startup founders were trying to navigate the crisis while also trying to showcase their products at one of the food industry’s biggest confabs, Natural Products Expo West. One such founder was Darko Mandich of Melibio, a company that makes a honey alternative via precision fermentation. Mandich was working at the booth when he started getting a barrage of text messages from associates about the SVB crisis.

“From three different investors, I received text messages that were going around,” Mandich said in an interview with Food Dive. “‘Have you seen the news?’ ‘Are you guys exposed to SVB?’ ‘Darko, you might need to react on this.'”

“And I was like, ‘What’s happening?'” Mandich continued. “Then I checked out the news, and I was really shocked.”

Many of the founders impacted by the crisis expressed relief once the Fed, the Treasury, and the FDIC issued a joint statement on Sunday outlining how they would assure all depositor funds in SVB and another financial institution, Signature Bank, would access to all of their deposits on Monday, March 13th.

Omsom updated their Instagram message upon news of the US government’s intervention: as of 6:15p ET, a statement was released by the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and FDIC saying that all SVB depositors will have access to their accounts starting Monday 3/13! We won’t breathe easy until we have access to our funds, but this is DEFINITELY a win 😭.

But like founders across the startup world, those leading food tech companies are newly aware of institutional risk and are figuring out how to manage it going forward.

Stephen Kalb, the CEO of Seattle-based Shelf Engine, started transferring his money out of SVB on Monday, telling PBS he had learned a “very hard lesson.”

“I obviously now know banks aren’t as safe as I used to think they were,” he said.

Shiru’s Partnership With Puratos Adds Further Credibility to its Protein Discovery Platform

In the world of food tech, decisions made on viable data are good, and a lot of data is even better. But with Shiru, a functional ingredient discovery company, with a dataset of more than 450 million known proteins, you are in rarified air and a welcome partner to forward-thinking companies.

With that in mind, Shiru has announced a new partnership with Puratos, a Belgium-based company that supplies food ingredients for bakeries. Shiru’s Flourish platform will evaluate naturally occurring proteins that could serve as a next-generation egg replacement.

“At Puratos, we truly believe that collaborations can fuel innovation within the food ecosystem,” stated Paul Baisier, Chief R&D Officer at Puratos. “As a company rooted in biology and science, Shiru is the perfect partner in the Puratos’s journey to finding novel uses for proteins discovered by Shiru’s Flourish platform as functional food ingredients that are sustainable, healthy, and delicious. Together with Shiru, we will be able to accelerate our plant-based product innovation pipeline for the benefit of our customers and consumers.”

Julian Lewis, Shiru’s Vice President of Business Development, told The Spoon why his company is excited about this partnership. “(Puratos) will help us scale up these (egg replacement) proteins using their fermentation facilities to a large kind of food grade sample, where we can then do more extensive food application testing. And through this partnership, we have a clear path to fully scaling these ingredients and bringing them to market.”

At this stage of its life cycle, Alameda, Calif.-based Shiru lives for such a partnership. Its database Flourish Flourish uses AI and machine learning to analyze its database of nearly 450 million proteins found in nature. Each application—for example, a plant-based meat company that wants to add taste to its burgers—identifies ingredients that will solve that specific functional ingredient challenge. This business model, Lewis explains, might expand to his company by commercializing some of its discoveries.

“There’ll be other food categories where we might collaborate, or we might do it ourselves,” Lewis said of opportunities down the road. “We might end up in a hybrid where we’re doing some stuff ourselves and collaborating with experts in other fields just to accelerate its market path.”

Functionality is Shiru’s secret sauce, which is the ability to target a specific property of a particular food product. Lewis explains:

“There are three categories we can play in. There’s replace in which we substitute an ingredient for one that, for example, doesn’t work properly. A second is taste. And what we mean by that is some plant-based foods are not that good, and I have yet to find a vegan cheese that works. Lastly, it is to transform. What new foods could be generated in the future that is not replacing traditional products, which are just new things? And maybe we can do that by discovering new functional protein.”

One of the side benefits of working with a complex database is the ability to help food manufacturers get away from using relatively unhealthy ingredients in some plant-based products that give the impression of being a clean alternative. “We’re aiming to provide a much better toolkit of ingredients to the food developers trying to create plant-based foods,” Lewis said.

Lewis adds that while Shiru is currently generally focused on the plant-based world, there’s no reason it will not be a player as the cultured food business develops. “All food has, I would say, taste and texture challenges, so with cultured meats, some additional ingredients may be required. And we’re already working on the early stage with players in that space as well. Our goal is to create more sustainable food ingredients that are both required and interesting.”

Here’s Our Q&A With Ranjani Varadan, Who Just Became Shiru’s New CSO After a Decade With Impossible Foods

When she became the first scientist ever hired by Pat Brown at Impossible Foods in 2011, Ranjani Varadan became a pivotal part of the R&D team for one of the earliest entrants in the modern plant-based meat industry. Over the next decade, she would play a part in helping guide Impossible through many technical milestones, from the very early days in its stealth lab all the way to commercial scaleup.

And now, Varadan hopes to witness many more seminal moments in the alternative protein space as part of her new role as the Chief Science Officer for Shiru, a company that makes ingredients for CPG companies building plant-based meats and other alternative proteins. Varadan will oversee all aspects of R&D, from discovery and screening to ingredient pre-production.

I sat down with Varadan to talk to ask her about her time at Impossible, the decision to come to Shiru, how she believes her new company differentiates itself in a fast-growing alt protein market, and what she sees going forward for the plant-based foods and alternative protein industry. Answers have been edited slightly for readability.

Congratulations on your move. Tell us a little about your journey before you got to Shiru.

I have a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Maryland, and then I was a postdoctoral fellow for several years.

And at the end of my postdocs, I was thinking about what to do. A fairly traditional route for folks with my training is the biopharma industry, and that was not particularly compelling to me at the time. I wanted to do something that was meaningful. So I was very fortunate in that I was put in touch with Pat Brown who had just founded Impossible in 2011

For me, that was the first time that I could put climate change, food security, and animal welfare all in one sentence. And it was really eye-opening and very compelling for me. It was a vision Pat had at the time with a very small team of people, so I joined because it was really so refreshing and such a different way of thinking about the problem.

What attracted you to the opportunity at Shiru?

I’m excited to be joining Shiru because I think we really need a way to rethink ingredients. Even for companies like Impossible, for them to make the next game-changing product, you really need access to ingredients that will not carry whatever other sentiments of the plants they’re extracted from, or be limited in the type of functionality like soy proteins. So I think for technical reasons, ingredients are going to bring the next big change to plant-based foods, and I’m very, very excited about Shiru doing that.

Talk about that transition from Impossible, an early stage, vertically integrated plant-based meat company which essentially built the entire ingredient list for their consumer products, to Shiru, which is a B2B company building novel ingredients for other plant-based meat companies, who in turn build consumer-facing products.

At the time (at Impossible), we were really trying to extract every different thing, every different protein so we could to play with it, understand what it does, and formulate a product with it. Ultimately, I think when you see the reality of what it takes to commercialize a product, it is very difficult for a single company to be vertically integrated for each one of these ingredients. Because the mission is not to create one SKU for plant-based meat or whatever other product a company is making. You want to be able to make a variety of different products for the economic viability of the company itself.

This is one of the reasons I find Shiru to be very interesting and fascinating because instead of trying to do it like that, you’re saying ‘we’ll create the toolkit’, right? And not only is it going to be a viable business model for Shiru, but it’s also going to help the entire community.

My understanding of Shiru is that you’re building alternative protein building blocks, but you’re not trying to create animal identical ones like you might see like with some other precision fermentation-focused companies. It’s actually looking within plants and looking for functional equivalency rather an exact equivalence with an animal protein. That’s an interesting switch for you.

Shiru is trying to create an ingredient toolkit coming from natural sources. Not just plants, it could be algae, it could be fungi, or other sources of proteins, but all naturally occurring sequences. And like you said, not looking for the exact one to one match. It’s an orthogonal way to think about the problem in a scientific way, because ultimately what you care about is the way the protein behaves. What is the texture, appearance, flavor, or whatever other aspects of the protein you are trying to create – can this protein do the same thing? As long as you’re satisfied that, it doesn’t matter whether it’s exactly the same protein or not.

One of the differentiation pitches I think I’ve heard from Shiru is this idea of building a massive database of potential plant-based protein ingredients. You’re using machine learning or AI to mine that. Talk about that. Is that is that a new thing for you?

A typical traditional approach is to say, ‘here are all sorts of plant proteins – soybeans, peas, what have you – let’s look at what these proteins can do for us? And then you find that it’s very limited. So now we have to find other sources of protein.

I think what Shiru is doing very intelligently is really leveraging validated tools from AI and machine learning and, I don’t want to get too technical, but using the sort of tools that are available for language modeling. So in a way that you might translate from one language to another, for example, using tools that have been developed for those types of things and applying that to proteins to really understand if I have a protein that looks like this, what are their proteins are going to look like that? So they’ve been able to utilize millions of protein sequences available in the public domain and use these machine learning tools to really find these matches. That’s why the library can be billions and billions, 10s or hundreds. And that’s unique, right?

It seems a lot more efficient. If you’re spending all this time trying to get an exact match to get an animal identical protein, it’s a very finite target you’re kind of aiming at. Whereas if you’re looking for functional equivalency, you have a much wider swath and I think it could accelerate time to market, correct?

Yes, And that’s why for a young company so early in their lifecycle, they already have targets. For a company with a team of forty or so people, to be at a stage where you have targets waiting to take into commercialization, is fantastic.

And because I believe that access to these types of ingredients will really create the next game-changing plant-based foods, for me it makes sense as the logical next step. I spent all this time kind of understanding the whole landscape of plant-based foods, helping to create them at Impossible. I was leading the initiative for strategic ingredients at Impossible before I left. And now to say, ‘Okay, actually here’s a completely different way of thinking about it.’

Does Shiru have a wet lab?

Yes, they do have a wet lab. I think the team is about 10 people in the lab right now. They have robotics set up to help do the rapid high throughput screening.

From a process perspective, like they’re you’re using algorithms to look through this huge dataset, sift through it, come up with promising candidates, and then you then move things into the lab?

Yes, and I think ultimately you would set up your platform for you to feed everything back the output from the wet lab right back into your learning.

What are you looking to accomplish over the next year?

I think in the very near term, really to absorb everything that’s going on at Shiru, but really to help commercialize their first few targets that are already in the works. That will be a great thing for Shiru, because it brings a lot of credibility to what they’re doing and brings in revenue which we can invest back into R&D, which is really the heart of the company. So I think that that’s just the beginning. And, you know, for all the reasons we talked about, very excited about how it’s gonna take off and really revolutionize the way we’re thinking about it.

Tell us a bit about Shiru recruiting you.

Shiru approach to me once my profile changed on LinkedIn. I was committed to teaching the entire year, so I took on advisory roles in several companies. In retrospect, I was very fortunate. I wasn’t going in too blind. I had the time to really talk to several folks and companies and really take a step back and look at what’s going on out there to understand what should be the next thing I want to do. So I’m glad I have that opportunity. I think Jasmine is an exceptional leader. You’ve talked to her. The team is wonderful. They have a great board. The board is also full of people with a lot of experience. So I think it’s going to be fantastic

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Podcast: Building a Next-Generation Ingredient Company with Shiru’s Jasmin Hume

As the former head of food chemistry for Eat Just, Dr. Jasmin Hume thought there was a lot of white space for innovation when it came to food ingredients.

She knew food companies would increasingly need new and novel ingredients they could build plant-based food products around, but felt there wasn’t enough research being done to discover these critical building blocks.

So she decided to start a company to do just that. So far, the company has raised over $20 million and recently hired Impossible Foods’ former VP of R&D and strategic ingredients.

On the podcast, Jasmin and I discuss a variety of topics, including:

  • How the alternative protein market is evolving from early fully vertically integrated brands to companies like Shiru that build ingredients and solutions for a variety of companies
  • The new cohort of food companies utilizing AI and ML to build the next generation of food
  • How what Shiru is doing with precision fermentation is different from that of Perfect Day and others trying to create animal-identical proteins
  • Where Jasmin sees the ingredient industry going in the future
  • Plus lots more!

You can listen to the podcast by clicking play below or you can find it at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Week in Food Tech Funding: AI-Powered Future Food Attracting Lots of Venture Capital

When it comes to AI meets food, it’s easy to think of food robots, precision farming, or even restaurant tech. But over the past year or so, we’ve seen a parade of new startups emerge that use machine learning and other forms of AI to develop new food building blocks.

Take Kingdom Supercultures. The company, which raised $25 million a couple of weeks ago, uses machine learning to explore the properties of existing cultures to create what it claims is the world’s largest biobank. From there, they mine to explore potentially new and interesting microbial combinations called supercultures that provide new functionality, flavors, and more.

And this week, a company called Shiru, which uses machine learning and precision fermentation to create analogs to animal-based ingredients, raised $17 million. Like Kingdom, Shiru is using AI to rapidly develop a massive proprietary database, only Shiru’s dataset is the first to focus on “protein identity with protein-related food function.” The company mines its database with machine learning to identify novel ingredients that replicate “the taste, texture, gelation, foaming, emulsification, and binding abilities of animal proteins.”

In short, both companies are using AI to build next-generation ingredient platforms and, in doing so, are hoping to accelerate the process of ingredient development by an order of magnitude over a purely wet lab approach.

And they’re not the only ones. Climax Foods, led by Google’s former head of data science, is building plant-based cheese by analyzing data sets using machine learning to figure out what novel tastes and textures a set of particular raw ingredients and isolates will yield. Brightseed is analyzing plant molecules using AI to understand and isolate new phytonutrient compounds and, you guessed it, build a database from which they make predictions about how these new compounds may impact health.

It’s an exciting time in the world of future food. As advances in AI and cutting-edge biotechnology continue to merge and yield new food building blocks at a breathtaking pace, we’ll be watching for the next Kingdom Supercultures and Shiru to emerge over the next year.

If you are the next company in this space, drop us a line. We’d like to hear from you.

And now for the rest of this week’s funding news.

Agtech

Pure Harvest Smart Farms – $65 Million: UAE-based precision agriculture firm Pure Harvest Smart Farms has raised $64.5 million in funding. Today Pure Harvest operates three farms in the UAE and is developing new farms in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Pure Harvest’s crops include tomatoes, leafy greens, and strawberries. The funding brings the company’s total invested capital to USD 271.6 million, which the company claims is the MENASA (Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia) region’s largest agtech investment.

Grubmarket – $145 Million – Grubmarket, a B2B and B2C digital supply chain company, has raised $145 million Series E. The company, which operates an online marketplace for fresh produce, offers managed warehousing and supply chain operation services across North America, and has a variety of cloud software for food wholesalers and farms, is on track for a $1 billion annualized run rate. The company plans to use the funding to expand into new markets (and hopefully to improve its website, which does not look at all like a website of a company close to $1B in revenue).

Fermentation

Aqua Cultured – $2.1 Million: Alt-seafood startup Aqua Cultured has raised $2.1 million in pre-seed funding. Unlike many other alt-seafood startups using a straight plant-based or cell-cultured approach, Aqua Cultured uses microbial fermentation techniques to create whole-muscle cut seafood alternatives. The company has developed formulas for tuna, whitefish, squid, and shrimp that leverage its novel fungi as the primary ingredient. Investors include Supply Change Capital, Aera VC, Sustainable Food Ventures, Hanfield Venture Partners, Lifely VC, Conscience VC, Kingfisher Capital, Big Idea Ventures. $2.1 million, a nice pre-seed raise, is even more impressive considering the company only started last month.

Coffee

Cometeer – $35 Million: Cometeer, a company that makes frozen coffee pucks and sells them in packs via a DTC-by-mail model, has raised a $35 million Series B. The company’s pucks consist of 10x strength frozen coffee which are dropped into hot water to make a drinkable cup of Joe. The pucks aren’t cheap at $64 for a box of 32, or $2 a pop. You can see Ashlen Wilder’s review of Cometeer here.

Fast Grocery

Gorillas – $1B: We have a few more details on the nearly $1 billion in funding for Gorillas we wrote about early this month. The company raised an almost $1 billion in funding, with Delivery Hero leading the round with $235 million in funding in exchange for 8% of the company. While that seems like a whole lotta capital, the company’s going to need it as it continues to build out a warehouse and dark store network that is already in 55 cities across Europe and the U.S.

CPG

N!CK’s – $100 Million – Better-for-you food company N!CK’s has hauled in an impressive $100 million in funding in a round was led by Kinnevik, Ambrosia and Temasek. Others throwing their hat in the N!CK’s ring include Gullspang, fellow Swedish food standout Oatly, Peak Bridge, Capagro and Nicoya. The company uses proprietary sweeteners and other ingredients to make ice cream, protein bars, and cookies. N!CK’s plans to use the money to accelerate its North American and European growth by expanding its product portfolio and doubling N!CK’S store count in 2022.

Food Robots

Fabric – $200 Million – Fabric, a maker of robotic micro-fulfillment solutions for grocery and e-commerce retailers, announced today they have raised $200 million in a Series C funding round. The new funding puts the company’s valuation at $1 billion. Formerly called Common Sense Robotics, Fabric works with large online grocers and retailers such as Walmart, Instacart, and FreshDirect to build automated micro-fulfillment centers via a mix of fulfillment-as-a-service and hybrid ownership models. The company’s solution involves an intricate blend of robotics, vertically stacked storage of products, and human operators and packers that help package up the final delivery and handoff to delivery drivers.