Key facts:
- Nature’s Fynd, formerly known as Sustainable bioproducts raises $80M
- Among more traditional investors are famous investors linked to climate change as former vice-president Al Gore and Bill Gates
- Nature’s Fynd has “discovered” a new type of protein in the Yellowstone nature reserve and use fermentation to multiply it and create a new kind of ingredient which requires much less natural resources than other types of proteins
Deep Dive:
This $80M series B will be used to grow the production capabilities of Nature’s Fynd. The company is known for the extremophile fungus that one of its co-founders discovered in Yellowstone’s geysers (known as yellowstonensis). As their names suggest, extremophile organisms are used to extreme situations and therefore require much fewer resources to multiply.
Going forward on this discovery, the company aims to create a complete ingredient based on this protein. For that, it is building a 35,000 square food facility to create a flour with 50%+ protein.
It has now $80M in its pockets. This round was led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures (with backers such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and other billionaires), Generation Investment Management (with Al Gore) and corporates such as Danone Manifesto Ventures and ADM Ventures.
DigitalFoodLab’s opinion:
Precision Fermentation, used by startups such as Perfect Day for dairy proteins or more broadly by Motif FoodWorks is becoming one of the most important trends in FoodTech and could change in a few years everything we know about food production. Using genetically modified organisms to reproduce proteins (or other organisms such as fats) that can range from casein, whey or newly discovered ones such as yellowstonensis.
