Removing Animals From The Food System: Climax Foods Raises $7.5M Seed For Innovation

Climax Foods, a year-old start-up, is using information science to innovate the future of food and make it at a rate point available to everyone.

The Berkeley, California-based business raised $7.5 million in an oversubscribed seed funding to converge data science and food science to produce a method to make food by transforming plants into items and getting rid of animals from the food system.

In fact, CEO Oliver Zahn told Crunchbase News that utilizing Climax Foods’ method will make the plant-based food taste similar or much better than animal-based items.

Investors in the seed round include At One Ventures, Manta Ray Ventures, S2G Ventures, Valor Siren Ventures, Prelude Ventures, ARTIS Ventures, Index Ventures, Luminous Ventures, Canaccord Genuity Group, Carrot Capital, Global Founders Capital and angel financiers.

Funding from the seed round will provide capital for research in taste, flavor, texture and nutrition of the most preferred animal-based food categories, starting with cheese, Zahn said.

“There is space for innovation in aged cheeses,” he included. “We will mine and take advantage of all that plants need to use with optimum results by taking all raw ingredients that have become part of the human diet plan, however not integrated in methods that can aid with nutrition, cost optimization, taste and texture. The models are really appealing.”

Innovating foods

Zahn matured a food lover in southern Germany and brought that love of food to the U.S., where he studied astrophysics at Harvard University. Together with two Nobel laureates, Zahn directed the Center for Cosmological Physics at UC Berkeley. Most just recently, he led data science efforts at Google and Difficult Foods.

“We do not desire to make food inferior since the better the foods are, the more effect,” Zahn said. “The plant kingdom is enormous and so huge that human beings have not scratched the surface of how to draw out plant products and integrate them, or apply natural techniques to change them into tastes and textures we desire.”

While Climax Foods is only getting begun, data science will be important to innovating food, he included. There are numerous thousands of plants the start-up is looking at to commercially source at scale, extract them and combine them into tastes and textures. To do this, Climax Foods has produced machine-learning structures to open a plant’s potential.

Next steps for Climax Foods

Climax Foods has roughly 10 employees and plans to employ 5 more this year in the areas of food researchers, protein functionality, item advancement and data scientists, Zahn stated.

In addition to research study, the business will be product focused for the next year with an objective of getting items on the marketplace quickly.

“The appeal of our technique is that it will become foreseeable to know for how long it will take to get to milestone research study and advancement and after that go to market,” Zahn said.

Illustration: Dom Guzman