London-based Better Dairy, a startup using fermentation technology to produce dairy proteins, has secured a $2.17m to continue researching its solution and bring products to market by 2022.
The seed round was led by Happiness Capital, a socially-focused VC out of Hong Kong, with further backing from CPT Capital, Veg Capital and Stray Dog Capital. Angel investors also made smaller contributions.
The cash will help founders Dr Christopher Reynolds and Jevan Nagarajah, who spun the business out of Imperial College London this January, help disrupt a traditional dairy industry that is one of the world’s worst emitters of greenhouse gases, and, as Nagarajah told TechCrunch, not creating optimal product.
“Dairy products themselves contain several unwanted pollutants such as growth hormones and antibiotics by virtue of the process of milking mothering cows and are thus not the most suitable for human consumption,” he says.
“While our intention was initially to enable a wave of better dairy products, our ambitions have grown to target the disruption of the entire dairy supply chain across dairy and non-dairy categories,” Nagarajah adds. “Our vision is to create a world where humans are vegan without even realizing it.”