Climax Foods Secures $7.5 Million to Enhance Plant-based Food with AI

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

FREMONT, CA: Climax Foods, the data science company innovating the future of food, raised $7.5 million in seed funding to develop 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.

Investors 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, CanaccordGenuity Group, Carrot Capital, and Global Founders Capital. The oversubscribed seed round also includes several mission-aligned angel investors.

The substantial 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.

Climax Foods aims to make products that are smarter and safer for consumers than their animal-based predecessors. Numerous ways to combine the hundreds of thousands of plant sources would need to be investigated to unlock the potentials if plants. To simplify this immense task, Climax Foods has created sophisticated machine learning frameworks to unlock all that plants naturally have to offer.

Oliver Zahn, the company's CEO, started Climax Foods to solve humanity's greatest problems through food solutions. Zahn says, "We are at a pivotal time where industrialization enabled explosive population growth and consumption of animal products. Today, more than 90 percent of all mammalian animals and more than 70 percent 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."

Founding members of the company include industry veteran Caroline Love, Chief Operating Officer, who previously led sales and operations at JUST, and PavelAronov, who will lead chemistry and analytics to define what supercharges taste and flavor in new products on a molecular level.