This Bioengineering Startup Just Raised $90 Million To Make Your Veggie Burger Taste Better

  • 📰 Forbes
  • ⏱ Reading Time:
  • 89 sec. here
  • 3 min. at publisher
  • 📊 Quality Score:
  • News: 39%
  • Publisher: 53%

United States Headlines News

United States Latest News,United States Headlines

This bioengineering startup just raised $90 million to make your veggie burger taste better:

for applications from microbes that replace fertilizer to ones that produce perfume fragrances. At Motif, that technology will be inserted into yeast cells. The yeast is then fermented, as in beer brewing, except that instead of producing alcohol, the yeast creates whatever by-product Motif’s customers want.

Take Impossible Foods, backed by top investors from Bill Gates to GV. Its soy-and-vegetable-based burger still bleeds like the traditional beef version because of an added ingredient called heme, a molecule found in nearly all living plants and animals. Impossible’s products rely on this ingredient, which is hard to source. But, as Jason Kelly, Ginkgo Bioworks cofounder and CEO says, Impossible doesn’t manufacture its own heme in-house. And that’s where labs like Motif come in.

“Instead of making another Impossible, we’ll be an ingredient supplier. We’ll supply the Impossible nugget or the egg-free whatever. There are many people who have branding and food development expertise who’d love to make new products in this space, but only a handful have the funding to do,” says Kelly. “We’re focused on what you’d add to the existing supply chain to make it better. All these companies need it to make a veggie fish stick that tastes good.

Ginkgo Bioworks was first founded in 2008, based largely on research developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by scientist Tom Knight, one of the company’s cofounders who came to biology after decades of work as a computer scientist. Knight’s philosophy of synthetic biology is to treat it as akin to computer programming, and Kelly sees his company as being a biological programmer.

“We’re like app developers writing a microbial app,” he said. “And our customers come to us and say, ‘Hey can you make me an app that does this?’”, which leverages the company’s assets and IP to create microbes that can replace or supplement fertilizer for different crops. That company kicked off with a $100 million Series A round with investments from its parent companies and Viking Global Investors LP.

 

Thank you for your comment. Your comment will be published after being reviewed.
Please try again later.

What a waste of time and money. Veggie burgers are worthless, if you want a burger eat a real burger, fake food is for small children.

The vegan bean burger barn is my safe place. I’m ending climate change one burger at a time ♥️

See how silicon valley just dish out racks Wenguss

Hard pass

Since I started replacing the Tofu with Beef my Veggie Burger tastes fantastic :D

Awesome

No no no, please carnivory anti anti pizza won’t like..

We have summarized this news so that you can read it quickly. If you are interested in the news, you can read the full text here. Read more:

 /  🏆 394. in US

United States Latest News, United States Headlines

Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.

A $90 Million Raise Will Create A Key Ingredients Supplier For The Plant-Based Alternatives Industrythe world gets mad.. Unicorn...how fitting..................... who cares?
Source: Forbes - 🏆 394. / 53 Read more »

A $90 Million Raise Will Create A Key Ingredients Supplier For The Plant-Based Alternatives Industry
Source: Forbes - 🏆 394. / 53 Read more »

A $90 Million Raise Will Create A Key Ingredients Supplier For The Plant-Based Alternatives Industrythe world gets mad.. Unicorn...how fitting..................... who cares?
Source: Forbes - 🏆 394. / 53 Read more »

A $90 Million Raise Will Create A Key Ingredients Supplier For The Plant-Based Alternatives Industry
Source: Forbes - 🏆 394. / 53 Read more »

SoftBank Leads $200 Million Investment In Storage Startup Clutter4-year-old storage company Clutter has closed a $200 million funding round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund
Source: Forbes - 🏆 394. / 53 Read more »