Äio (pronounced EYE-oh) is the Estonian god of desires. It appears a sweetly acceptable namesake for a rising startup, referred to as ÄIO, from that tiny Baltic nation that has developed a course of to show agricultural waste like sawdust into fat for the meals and beauty industries.
This course of may very well be a approach to cut back the world’s dependency on palm oil, which has grow to be a staple for meals and cosmetics for its emulsifying and preservative properties. Sadly, due to that plant’s want for warm humid climates, this huge trade has additionally notoriously destroyed rain forests and different delicate ecosystems to make approach for farms.
ÄIO was co-founded by biotechnology scientists Nemailla Bonturi and Petri-Jaan Lahtvee based mostly on Bonturi’s doctoral analysis. Throughout her research she invented a brand new microbe, a pressure of yeast. As a substitute of consuming sugar and outputting carbon dioxide fuel or alcohol as with bread and beer, this yeast consumes sugar and outputs fats molecules. The corporate will exhibit its tech as a part of Startup Battlefield at this 12 months’s TechCrunch Disrupt, which runs later this month in San Francisco.
Lahtvee was a professor of Meals Tech and Bioengineering at Estonia’s Tallinn College of Know-how and, in 2016, working his personal biotech lab there with Bonturi, his first rent. She introduced her microbe together with her, they usually labored on the molecule, altering it to be hardy sufficient to be manufactured.
As Estonia has a big agriculture base of corn and different meals grains, in addition to sugarcane and lumber, the lab studied how sugars produced from these ag waste streams may feed this microbe. “We started working on it, developing metabolic engineering tools,” Lahtvee advised TechCrunch. The reply: It may eat these sugars fairly properly.
The molecule’s “fat profile is very similar to existing fats,” Lahtvee says, and, in its solid-fat type, in all probability “most closely resembles chicken fat.” However it is usually doable to switch the fermentation course of to provide a liquid oil as properly that might make it an excellent various to manufactured oils like canola/rapeseed oil.
In 2022, the founders knew they’d a commercially viable answer and launched ÄIO with the hope of elevating enterprise cash and establishing business partnerships to carry it to market. They’ve raised about $7 million thus far and, since founding, have created strategies for creating precision fermentation merchandise, received the 2024 Baltic Sustainability Award, and signed over 100 corporations worldwide excited by collaboration, the startup says.
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“We have a very extensive analysis after we make our product and, so far, what we have seen is that our final product is to the same level as vegetable oils, except for the pesticides — even more pure,” Bonturi advised TechCrunch.
Subsequent up, the corporate plans to construct a facility to provide the fats in business portions by 2027, in addition to license the expertise to different beauty and meals producers. It additionally should receive licenses to promote the fat as meals, nation by nation, most probably beginning with Singapore, which has a historical past of being extra open to various meals manufacturing merchandise.
“Of course, it’s a novel type of way of producing food, and we have to go through all the permits and analysis,” Bonturi mentioned.
As such plans progress, Bonturi mentioned that she hopes to indicate how “two scientists in this small country could actually do something better for the world, but that’s just my personal dream.”
If you wish to be taught extra about ÄIO from the corporate itself — whereas additionally testing dozens of others, listening to their pitches, and listening to visitor audio system on 4 totally different phases — be part of us at Disrupt, October 27 to 29, in San Francisco. Be taught extra right here.
