Year: 2019

Today at MWC Barcelona OnePlus CEO Pete Lau unveiled an initiative to spur apps for 5G networks. The timing is right, too. With 5G launching around the world this year, carriers, phone makers and consumers alike have yet to develop a killer app for the massive increase of speed provided by 5G. Basically, OnePlus is asking for help developing uses for 5G.

OnePlus sees a lacking of imagination around 5G in the long term. Speaking on a panel, CEO Pete Lau stated he does not believe people have thought enough about how 5G can change lives in the long term.

This contest will select 20 finalists, who will get OnePlus devices. The winners will get a trip to OnePlus HQ and access to 5G testing labs, and support from Oneplus and EE.

Such contest were common around the launch of 4G as mobile device makers were attempting to bolster app marketplaces. But 5G apps, could look much different from 4G apps as much of the processing is offloaded to a central data center instead of happening on the device.

The promise of 5G is nearly here, but it will take initiatives and programs like this one from OnePlus to help make the possibilities clear to consumers.

Earlier this week OnePlus, along with nearly every other mobile phone maker, unveiled a 5G device.

In a joint press conference, NASA and SpaceX officials said that SpaceX has been approved to conduct the first orbital launch of the Crew Dragon.

The launch could come as early as March 2, and would be the last and most important hurdle to cross before SpaceX can send actual human astronauts to the International Space Station.

Since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, astronauts have had to make their way to the ISS via Russian Soyuz capsules. In order for SpaceX to take up the responsibility, it needs to prove it can make the full round trip without a hitch, including sending astronauts to the ISS, docking, and bringing them safely back to Earth with an ocean splash-down and boat recovery.

Considering the company is already behind schedule, passing the Demo-1 FRR is a big milestone.

The DM-1 Crew Dragon launch is slated for very early Saturday morning will be identical to the DM-2 launch, except that it will have dummies on board instead of actual astronauts.

If the DM-1 launch goes as planned, we could see the DM-2 launch in just a few months.

NASA will be live streaming much of the mission, including the launch, docking, and the return to Earth. The launch and docking will take place on Saturday and Sunday respectively, with the return scheduled for March 7.

[via Teslarati]

In an effort to one-up Spotify and Apple Music, Pandora this morning announced the launch of a new marketing tool for artists, called Pandora Stories. The feature allows artists to build music playlists combined with voice tracks, where they can add a narrative and deeper insights – explaining, for example, what a song means for them, what inspired their music, the story behind the music, or anything else they want to add. When listeners then play these Pandora Stories playlists, they get to hear both the music and the storytelling, interspersed.

The feature may not be only adopted by musicians, notes Pandora.

The company believes Pandora Stories may appeal to others who want to create music-driven stories, like actors, filmmakers, athletes, celebs, authors, podcasters, and thought leaders. This will be possible because the feature provides access to Pandora’s catalog of fully-licensed songs to use in Stories, the company says.

At launch, the first Pandora Stories include:

• John Legend’s Glorious Journey
• Pasito a Pasito Con Daddy Yankee
• Lauren Alaina is Doin’ Just Fine
• Perry Farrell’s Ocean-Sized Tales
• Brooklyn Soul with Tommy Brenneck
• The Music of Wes Anderson with Randall Poster
• Love Songs That Aren’t Really Love Songs

The last one is more of an example of how the new format could be used for storytelling, rather than one that focuses on a single artist. Future Stories are planned with 2 Chainz, Rob Thomas, and others.

The feature is rolling out as an addition to Pandora’s Artist Marketing Platform, Pandora’s suite of free, self-serve tools that help artists promote their songs, albums and podcasts. The platform has generated over 3 billion listener impressions to date, Pandora claims.

However, creators interested in using the feature will need to submit a form to receive access to the Pandora Stories tools, which implies a level of vetting is in place. (The company says any stories by these creators are reviewed by Pandora before they’re run.)

All users will be able to stream Pandora Stories, though some will have to watch an ad to do so. Premium subscribers can listen to Pandora Stories ad-free, while Pandora’s ad-supported and Plus listeners can listen by way of Premium Access, after viewing a 30-second ad.

Users will be able discover Pandora Stories using Search – the same way you’d look for one of Pandora’s standard curated playlists. The Stories may also be recommended to listeners through the Featured Playlists module in Browse.

To some extent, Spotify offers a behind-the-scenes look into some music, through its Genius-powered “Behind the Lyrics” feature, but that’s more passive. However, Spotify also offers a number of video shows focused on musicians and artists. But neither of these are a direct comparison with Pandora Stories.

Instead, the idea for Pandora Stories is meant to capitalize on listeners’ growing interest in streaming podcasts, by offering them access to voice-based stories with a different twist. Instead of having the podcaster discuss the music or interview an artist, the new format allows the artist to do that, directly.

“Podcasts can tell stories about music, but it’s difficult to include full songs, and regular playlists have songs but lack personal context from the artists behind them,” said Jeff Zuchowski, Pandora’s VP of Artist Marketing and Industry Relations, in a statement. “We’ve created Pandora Stories to fill that void, bringing together the greatest strengths of both podcasts and playlists, and giving artists the opportunity to connect with listeners on a uniquely deep and personal level,” he added.

A new wave of female-led businesses want to help women get off.

Dipsea, an app-based platform for short-form erotic audio stories, is the latest to grab funding from venture capital investors. The female-founded San Francisco-headquartered startup, which officially launched in December, has raised $5.5 million in a round led by Bedrock Capital and Thrive Capital. The funding comes amid a notable explosion in interest and investment in audio content consumption and creation, as well as an uptick in AirPod sales, easily removable wireless earbuds that encourage listeners to enjoy snackable audio like Dipsea’s erotica.

In addition to Dipsea’s seed financing, podcasting platform WaitWhat secured a $4.3 million round this month. Days earlier, Himalaya nabbed $100 million to scale its podcast distribution tool and a pair of podcast startups, Gimlet and Anchor, sold to Spotify in a nine-figure deal.

Meanwhile, as the audio content space booms, more attention is being paid to female entrepreneurs eyeing venture capital. Enter Dipsea, whose founders say the business captures the zeitgeist of female empowerment.

Dipsea’s subscription-based app, available for $8.99 per month or $48 per year, offers  short audio stories meant to turn women on. The app’s library, which is poised to expand with the new cash, includes narrative sexy stories and non-narrative guided audio pieces. The stories are designed to be listened to at any time, with the companies examples including solo in bed, while getting ready for a date, or to help turn off boss brain on the way home from work. The subscription business model made me wince at first but auditory erotica doesn’t exactly lend itself to an advertising business model after all and once I listened to a few of Dipsea’s short stories, I understood that service is something many women would pay for.  

Since the onset of internet porn, there’s been a gaping hole in content crafted specifically for women. Most women use “mental framing” to get turned on, meaning they imagine scenarios, often with detailed story-lines and characters to stimulate themselves, per a study by OMGYes & The Kinsey Institute. Dipsea’s sensorial audio storytelling sets the mood and sparks the listener’s imagination.

“Audio is amazing because it’s imaginative, it requires you to paint a picture in your brain that’s very stimulating and it’s super intimate and very personal,” Dipsea co-founder and chief executive officer Gina Gutierrez told TechCrunch.

The brand and design strategist started Dipsea alongside chief technical officer Faye Keegan, a former product manager at Neighborly. Gutierrez said she came up with the idea while meditating with Headspace, a wellness app.

The founders have prioritized diversity of perspective, working with freelance writers of different backgrounds on various episodes, as well as consensuality, ensuring a form of verbal consent is worked into storylines. They recently hired their first staff writer. 

“To me the future of entertainment is sensory,” Gutierrez said. “This felt like it could be a medium for women that hadn’t been harnessed or attempted before.”

There has been a wave of fintech startups emerging that make different kinds of investing more accessible to a wider pool of people, and today one of them has raised a substantial round of money to help fill out its mission.

YieldStreet — which provides a platform for making alternative investments in areas like real estate, marine/shipping, legal finance, commercial loans, and other opportunities that in the past were only open to institutional investors — is today announcing that it has raised $62 million in a Series B round of funding.

Cofounder and CEO Milind Mehere said in an interview that the money will be used to build a fundamental expansion of the platform so that any interested party can invest.

With a view to improving everyone’s financial lot in life, the name of the game is capitalism, and more specifically democratising the opportunity to invest, making it possible for more people beyond the often-cloistered and clubby environment of the investment world.

“In order for consumers to move to financial security and financial independence, they should be given access to the same products institutions have,” said Mehere. “This is about creating the most wealth out of people’s money, irrespective of their networks.”

The round was led by Edison Partners, with participation from Greenspring Associates, Raine Ventures and a large multi-billion dollar NY family office. YieldStreet’s valuation is not being disclosed with this round. Prior to this, the company raised around $116 million, with $100 million of that in debt, according to PitchBook.

To date, YieldStreet has seen more than $600 million invested on its platform from over 100,000 members, with an expected 12 percent IRR and more than 300K principal and interest payments made to its investors. Up to now a person had to be an accredited investor to benefit from this. That was already a progression on those investments being restricted only to institutions, but it is still a relatively small pool of users. In the US, where YieldStreet operates, being an accredited investor has a specific set of criteria that includes individuals having a net worth of at least $1 million and income of $200,000 or more.

The plan is now to use the funding to expand the funnel by creating new vehicles for investing that will not require people to be accredited to get involved. This will build on groundwork the company has already laid with YieldStreet Wallet, a savings account that provides 2.2 percent interest, which is open to everyone.

The idea will be to offer non-accredited investors investment vehicles, created by YieldStreet, where they will be able to access multiple products, Mehere said. “We are working through the legal and regulatory aspects now.” He added that the company is also looking at ways of tapping into retirement and IRA accounts for these users as well.

The Jobs Act in the US, and the wider growth of people shifting all of their financial services online, have created a landscape of startups that are liberalising how capital moves. Many of these are specifically freeing up the arcane and rarified world of investment. They include companies like Robinhood, which has built a platform for trading public stocks. In the area of private investment — that is, investing in businesses and opportunities that are not publicly traded — we have seen PeerStreet, which is offers a service similar to YieldStreet but focusing on real estate. In the UK, you also have startups like LendInvest which lets property buyers bypass traditional mortgages by letting others put up the funding for those purchases.

“The ability for individual, accredited and non-accredited, investors to access products that previously were only available to institutional investors is a key part of fintech’s promise to leverage technology to create access and reduce fees on these types of investments. In addition, lower fees can be passed on to investors to allow them to achieve a higher return,” said Chris Sugden, managing partner, Edison Partners, in an email. (Sugden will also be joining the startup’s board with this investment.) 

What’s interesting is that the sheer number of fintech startups, even if you only focus in on those centered around investing, will inevitably lead to some M&A down the line, and that is an area that YieldStreet will also be exploring ahead.

Yesterday gave us a closer view of the Samsung Galaxy Fold. Of course, there were still a plate of glass, a security rope and a few feet between us and the device. Huawei, thankfully, was a bit more willing to grant us access to their own foldable, the Mate X at a closed door meeting earlier this morning.

There were still ground rules for the foldable. Namely, a Huawei rep was driving the whole thing. Limited interaction with the device itself was allowed, but he was doing most of the navigating and all of the folding. While the product is pretty close to final, there’s still some work to be done before bringing it to market, and in Huawei’s words, the company wanted to give us “the best possible experience.”

In this case, that mostly means knowing the limitations of what the near-final product can actually do. For now, that means web browsing, some photography and opening up Google Maps — which, to be fair, comprises a fairly large chunk of what people will actually be doing with the product.

That said, there’s a lot to account for with a new form factor. After all, phone makers have gotten really good at working with a defined two-dimensional plan, a decade after the introduction of the first iPhone and Samsung Galaxy device. Folding, flipping and bouncing between screens presents all sorts of new challenge.

That said, in the demo at least, things seemed pretty smooth here. The device was pretty responsive in a less controlled environment than we’d previously seen it — or, for that matter, the Fold — in. There were few moments and some blank screens for half a second or so, however, when the apps had to jump screens. All of which is to see the Mate X is real. I’ve seen it, and am so far pretty impressive with the execution.

The product design, too, is quite well thought out. The product is surprisingly thin both folded and unfolded, and elements like the fold over camera lip, which offers a place to grip (a la the lip on the rear of the Kindle Oasis) are nice touches.

The screen, too, looks quite nice at first glance. That said, as with all of the foldable we’ve seen to date, capturing a glare from overhead light picks up crinkles on the display, along with a large seam in the middle, where the device folds over. You can’t feel them with your finger as you glide over to touch, but it’s easy to imagine how messy all of this could ultimately look after a few years of use.

The system also works when folded at a 90 degree angle, which could prove useful for future executions that Huawei is looking into. It’s clear that this is just the beginning of not only the form factor, but practical applications. It’s going to be watching developers figure out all of the stuff they can do with the product.

That “still early days” approach also to price point. Huawei acknowledges that the device is prohibitively expensive at ~ €2,200. That price includes the design to add 5G to the product — notably, there is no non-5G version planned, unlike the Galaxy Fold. That will no doubt make the Mate X even more of a niche product, until the next-gen cellular service rolls out for more users.

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In a way, the Mate X is a proof of concept — albeit proof that the thing can be relatively mass produced. At double the cost of a high-end flagship, I don’t expect the company plans to sell a lot of these, but the more it’s able to scale, the lower the price will ultimately be.

Facebook has taken the decision to remove the Facebook page and Instagram profile of far right activist, Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

Twitter permanently banned the founder of the far right English Defence League almost a year ago.

In a blog post announcing the decision Facebook says Yaxley-Lennon repeatedly broke its community standards. It writes:

Tommy Robinson’s Facebook Page has repeatedly broken these standards, posting material that uses dehumanizing language and calls for violence targeted at Muslims. He has also behaved in ways that violate our policies around organized hate. As a result, in accordance with our policies, we have removed Tommy Robinson’s official Facebook Page and Instagram profile. This is not a decision we take lightly, but individuals and organizations that attack others on the basis of who they are have no place on Facebook or Instagram.

“Our rules also make clear that individuals and organizations that are engaged in “organized hate” are not allowed on the platform, and that praise or support for these figures and groups is also banned. This is true regardless of the ideology they espouse,” Facebook adds.

It’s not clear what took the company so long to shutter Yaxley-Lennon’s pages given repeated breaches of its community standards.

The move comes two months after Facebook closed pages of another far right activist, James Goddard, also for hate speech violations.

Goddard had been using Facebook’s platform to solicit donations to fund activism which included intimidating politicians and journalists around Westminster — livestreaming the encounters to social media followers.

The activity of Goddard and small group of extreme Brexit supporters led the speaker of the House of Commons to write to the head of the Met Police urging action against the “aggressive, threatening and intimidating behaviour”.

Political attention has sharply stepped up around the social impacts of tech platforms and UK ministers are posed to set out a policy plan for regulating social media safety.

Attentive, a Techstars Boulder alumnus, closing of a $1.2M Seed round co-led by Lisbon based Indico Capital Partners and Luxembourg based Mangrove Capital Partners. This also marks Mangrove’s first ever investment into a Portugal-based start-up. The southern-European country has surged as a European startup destination with the launch of new funds like Indico, acting as host to the giant Web Summit and offering warmer climes than chilly Northern Europe.

Attentive has an “augmented sales assistant” which allows teams to keep up with their sales pipeline, and guides managers to allocate resources better.

The new Attentive app works with Slack, so should fit relatively easily into teams that use that platform, allowing teams to update their CRMs without needing to open the Attentive app itself.

Ex-Googler Daniel Araújo, co-founder and CEO, says: “A very common problem in sales teams is that more than 1/3 of their time is ‘lost’ in administrative tasks… Technology should aim towards more efficient time management, which is what Attentive helps sales teams achieve”.

Stephan Morais, Partner at Indico Capital Partners, commented: “Enterprise sales and data are two crucial areas in today’s software world if you want to be competitive. Attentive is the intelligent layer that merges these and they are doing it at the right time. Moreover, the team has the resilience, technical ability and global network to take the company to the next level“.

Yannick Oswald, Principal at Mangrove adds: “By automating sales data input for teams across CRMs and industries, Attentive’s AI collects millions of sales actions that go beyond mere transactional database records and can guide users towards behaviors that achieve much better sales outcomes.”

Direct-to-consumer startups — making products that leverage the internet to bypass third-party marketplaces and retailers to engage with and sell directly to their customers — have been one of the biggest categories of growth in the world of e-commerce, and today one of the startups that helped create and prove the model is announcing a big round of funding to take its business to the next stage.

ThirdLove, which started with bras and now makes and sells a variety of lingerie and underwear catering to a wide variety of women’s shapes and sizes — in part through technology it developed that uses a smartphone camera to size and suggest products — has raised $55 million in funding.

CEO Heidi Zak, who co-founded the company with husband David Spector (both are ex-Google execs), said in an interview that the money will be used to help ThirdLove add even more sizes beyond the 78 that are offered today (“a bra for every body” is the expression she uses); as well as grow into three new areas: retail, international markets and category expansion into areas such as swim and athletic wear.

Not all of these may be coming online in the next year, she added, but the money will go towards building strategies in all three.

This round bumps ThirdLove’s valuation up to $750 million, a huge boost considering that the startup has only raised around $68 million since being founded in 2013. ThirdLove is already generating $100 million in revenues annually, Spector said, and has seen some 12 million to date use its Fit Finder, the tool in the app that measures a woman’s proportions in about a minute.

As impressive as that valuation sounds, so is the list of backers in this latest cash infusion. It’s being co-led by L. Catterton, which is owned in part by the luxury goods conglomerates LVMH and Groupe Arnault; and investment bank Allen & Company. But also participating are Anne Wojcicki, the cofounder and CEO of 23andMe; her sister Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube; broadcaster Katie Couric; Nancy Peretsman, MD of Allen & Company; Tim Armstrong, former CEO of Oath and AOL (who himself is making a big move now into DTC); Jeff Keswin; Michael Zeisser, former US chairman at Alibaba; Felicis Ventures and Valor Equity. (Existing investors include Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Yuri Milner and Keith Rabois.)

“I’m a big fan of ThirdLove’s mission to build a brand for every woman, regardless of her shape, size, age, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation,” said Anne Wojcicki in a statement. “ThirdLove promotes reality over fantasy and shows the spectacular beauty of all sizes, shapes and colors of women.”

It’s a fair question to ask how and why a bra company is attracting attention from tech investors, and why TechCrunch (or any publication) might write about it as a tech startup.

The first answer is the most generic (but possibly the most important, as it’s one that we see infusing our news coverage at TC on a daily basis). Every company today is potentially a tech company, and every industry is potentially a tech industry. That is to say, we have well passed the point where just about any business or vertical can be built with a tech approach in mind, to underpin the product itself; or to help deliver that product to the world in a way that is better than what preceded it. ThirdLove is doing both of those.

On the part of the product itself, the company has leveraged the evolution in modern garment manufacturing, with the growth of smartphone usage and online shopping, as well as developments in AI-based computer vision.

To get a bra using the ThirdLove app, a woman takes some selfies, which are in turn used to help formulate the best bra size for her body. “Best size”, meanwhile, has taken on a new meaning. In the past, women with non-standard proportions would have needed to buy bras from ad hoc bra makers — time consuming and expensive.

ThirdLove, however, uses big data analytics to essentially aggregate the long tail, turning a single person’s quest into one from many people, and aggregating images of all the busts to help build the design of the bras, which it executes by tapping into more precise manufacturing techniques.

This is how ThirdLove manages to both create more individualised and tailored pieces while still achieving the all-important metric of e-commerce, economies of scale.

The second way ThirdLove uses technology is for what Zak describes as “using data for market fit.” It’s a big buyer of Facebook ads that target people it thinks could become customers, and it follows through with a more complete customer experience both in terms of recommending items and creating an efficient way to browse and then buy.

“We use the data we collect from Fit Finder” — that is the measuring tool in its app — “to create a better physical product and individual sizes, and then we use the data to create a better digital product experience,” Zak said. “We do all this in a way that more traditional retailers don’t.”

Indeed, that old versus new was highlighted to great impact last year, when ThirdLove waged a publicity campaign against the much-bigger Victoria’s Secret after its CEO made a dig against the company in an interview. It so happened that the CEO also used the same interview to make some other outmoded remarks that did not go down well with investors and the public, and ultimately he ended up stepping down. ThirdLove didn’t fully cause his departure, but its star definitely rose in the wake of all the controversy.

Zak said the resulting attention, which happened in November, may have had an effect. “We’re not a gifting destination traditionally, but then we suddenly had a stronger November and December,” she said.

With the new funds and new strategy, it will be worth watching how ThirdLove develops products down the road. Currently the company only has distribution in the US, although it’s already seeing a lot of orders coming from outside the country. The plan will be build more facilities more local to different international markets to seize the opportunity with that interest.

Similarly, its move into retail should be interesting. So far, the only work that the company has done in brick-and-mortar has been in pop-up shops where the aim was not to sell merchandise but simply to spread the word. Zak and Spector said they would like to retain some of its app-based individualised experience in any kind of physical retail play. It’s not clear how that would look, but it could potentially mean ThirdLove concessions in shops similar to what you typically see in the cosmetics department, where customers are consulted and sold items direct by people representing individual brands.

Continuing its quest to become the Amazon Web Services for biomanufacturing, href="http://ginkgobioworks.com/">Ginkgo Bioworks has launched a new spinoff called Motif Ingredients with $90 million in funding to develop proteins that can serve as meat and dairy replacements.

It’s the second spinout for Ginkgo since late 2017 when the company partnered with Bayer to launch Joyn Bio, a startup researching and developing bacteria that could improve crop yields.

Now, with Motif, Ginkgo is tackling the wild world of protein replacements for the food and beverage industry through the spinoff of Motif Ingredients.

It’s a move that’s likely going to send shockwaves through several of the alternative meat and dairy companies that were using Ginkgo as their manufacturing partner in their quest to reduce the demand for animal husbandry — a leading contributor to global warming — through the development of protein replacements.

“To help feed the world and meet consumers’ evolving food preferences, traditional and complementary nutritional sources need to co-exist. As a global dairy nutrition company, we see plant- and fermentation-produced nutrition as complementary to animal protein, and in particular cows’ milk,” said Judith Swales, the Chief Operating Officer, for the Global Consumer and Foodservice Business, of Fonterra, an investor in Ginkgo’s new spinout.

To ensure the success of its new endeavor Ginkgo has raised $90 million in financing from industry insiders like Fonterra and the global food processing and trading firm Louis Dreyfus Co., while also tapping the pool of deep-pocketed investors behind Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the climate focused investment fund financed by a global gaggle of billionaires including Marc Benioff, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, John Doerr, Vinod Khosla, Jack Ma, Neil Shen, Masayoshi Son, and Meg Whitman.

Leading Ginkgo’s latest spinout is a longtime veteran of the food and beverage industry, Jonathan McIntyre, the former head of research and development at another biotechnology startup focused on agriculture — Indigo Ag.

McIntyre, who left Indigo just two years after being named the company’s head of research and development, previously had stints at Monsanto, Nutrasweet, and PepsiCo (in both its beverage and snack divisions).

“There’s an opportunity to produce proteins,” says McIntyre. “Right now as population grows the protein supply is going to be challenged. Motif gives the ability to create proteins and make products from low cost available genetic material.”

Photo: paylessimages/iStock

Ginkgo, which will have a minority stake in the new company, will provide engineering and design work to Motif and provide some initial research and development work on roughly six to nine product lines.

That push, with the financing, and Ginkgo’s backing as the manufacturer of new proteins for Motif Ingredients should put the company in a comfortable position to achieve McIntyre’s goals of bringing his company’s first products into the market within the next two years. All Motif has to pay is cost plus slight overhead for the Ginkgo ingredients.

“We started putting Motif together around February or March of 2018,” says Ginkgo co-founder Jason Kelly of the company’s plans. “The germination of the business had its inception earlier though, from interacting with companies in the food and beverage scene. When we talked to these companies the strong sense we got was if there had been a trusted provider of outsourced protein development they would have loved to work with us.”

The demand from consumers for alternative sources of protein and dairy — that have the same flavor profiles as traditional dairy and meats — has reached an inflection point over the past few years. Certainly venture capital interest into the industry has soared along with the appetite from traditional protein purveyors like Danone, Tyson Foods, and others to take a bite out of the market.

Some industry insiders think it was Danone’s 2016 acquisition of WhiteWave in a $12.5 billion deal that was the signal which brought venture investors and food giants alike flocking to startups that were developing meat and dairy substitutes. The success of companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods has only served to prove that a growing market exists for these substitutes.

At the same time, solving the problem of protein for a growing global population is critical if the world is going to reverse course on climate change. Agriculture and animal husbandry are huge contributors to the climate crisis and ones for which no solution has made it to market.

Investors think cultured proteins — fermented in tanks like brewing beer — could be an answer.

Photograph: David Parry/EPA

“Innovative or disruptive solutions are key to responding to changing consumer demand and to addressing the challenge of feeding a growing world population sustainably,” said Kristen Eshak Weldon, Head of Food Innovation & Downstream Strategy at Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC), a leading merchant and processor of agricultural goods. “In this sense, we are excited to partner with Motif, convinced that its next-generation ingredients will play a vital role.”

Breakthrough Energy Ventures certainly thinks so.

The investment firm has been busy placing bets across a number of different biologically based solutions to reduce the emissions associated with agriculture and cultivation. Pivot Bio is a startup competing with Ginkgo’s own Joyn Bio to create nitrogen fixing techniques for agriculture. And earlier this month, the firm invested as part of a $33 million round for Sustainable Bioproducts, which is using a proprietary bacteria found in a remote corner of Yellowstone National Park to make its own protein substitute.

For all of these companies, the goal is nothing less than providing a commercially viable technology to combat some of the causes of climate change in a way that’s appealing to the average consumer.

“Sustainability and accessible nutrition are among the biggest challenges facing the food industry today. Consumers are demanding mindful food options, but there’s a reigning myth that healthy and plant-based foods must come at a higher price, or cannot taste or function like the animal-based foods they aim to replicate,” said McIntyre, in a statement. “Biotechnology and fermentation is our answer, and Motif will be key to propelling the next food revolution with affordable, sustainable and accessible ingredients that meet the standards of chefs, food developers, and visionary brands.”