The world’s leading AI platform for food & beverage R&D and commercialization secures funding to accelerate growth, create AI agents that turbocharge food and beverage development, and accelerate adoption across global CPG, foodservice, and ingredient companies.
WASHINGTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#AI–Proxy Foods AI, the food and beverage R&D platform built to turbocharge product development with an agentic AI solution, today announced a $6M seed round led by Ted Leonsis, Founder, Chairman, Managing Partner, and CEO, Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), and lead participation by Robert G. Hisaoka and SWaN & Legend Venture Partners (Anthony Nader and Fredrick Schaufeld). The funding will accelerate the transformation of food and beverage development with stronger capabilities supporting food science, regulatory and commercialization activities, as well as expansion of the company’s enterprise customer base globally.
Proxy Foods AI’s R&D platform is gaining adoption among leading food manufacturers, ingredient companies, and restaurant brands. After a Demo Day win at Tyson Foods and becoming a resident start-up, Proxy Foods AI has expanded to customers including leading food and beverage CPG companies, like Barilla and Gefsinus, industry partners like MISTA (owned by Givaudan), as well as trusted by restaurant chains like CAVA. Proxy Foods AI’s average platform customer has over $1B in annual revenue and aims to leverage AI R&D to expand competitive advantage in its segment.
Proxy Foods AI addresses the need for the food industry to adapt to shifting consumer expectations around nutrition, label and sustainability, while maintaining affordability and improving taste. Traditional R&D processes are struggling to keep pace with changing market demands, while the Proxy Foods AI platform is designed to integrate human insight with technology to help design the world’s best food products.
The platform leverages decades of institutional knowledge that often is locked in disconnected files, predicts formulation performance before a single benchtop trial, and gets stronger products to market in a fraction of the time. Customers have achieved:
- Improved concept acceptance and accelerated speed in new product development, achieving 80% less iterations
- 2–10% reduction in cost-of-goods in reformulations
- Prototype timelines compressed from months to days
- Full platform ROI from a single incremental successful product launch
- Accelerated data enablement to facilitate digital and AI transformation in CPG and Foodservice companies
“Leading food and beverage companies leverage our platform to create a new R&D environment, where teams are empowered by technology to fully use their creative capacity, quickly reimagine legacy products, open up new categories, and deliver better taste, nutrition, and affordability,” said Panos Kostopoulos, CEO of Proxy Foods AI. “AI helps solve the inefficiencies and imbalances of large food manufacturing systems, and the result is better food at scale, for everyone.”
The company has also established multiple research collaborations to advance the AI formulation science underpinning the platform. Working with Stanford University and Food System Innovations (FSI), Proxy Foods AI developed product optimization models based on Expert Guided Bayesian Optimization (EGBO), a method that allowed near perfect matching in sensory characteristics, beating traditional development approaches. Proxy Foods AI also is pursuing a Good Food Institute GFI-funded research project with the Federal University of Paraná and McGill University on AI-driven cell culture media development for cultivated meat.
The platform’s enterprise architecture is built for the security demands of global R&D organizations. A recently announced partnership with Aperio Global adds a Zero Trust, quantum-resilient security layer that enables computation on encrypted data without exposing proprietary formulations. The combined solution is designed for organizations requiring trust, traceability, and transparency across R&D, sourcing, manufacturing, and regulatory workflows.
“When I first met Panos, it was clear he was building a platform that could revolutionize our global food system, and I was eager to support his vision,” said Ted Leonsis, Co-Founder and Lead Board Director of Proxy Foods AI. “Proxy Foods AI is applying innovative technology to one of the world’s largest and most essential industries in a way that is practical, measurable and built for scale. This funding will help expand the capabilities of Proxy Foods AI’s platform and bring its technology to more food and beverage companies around the world, fundamentally reshaping and accelerating innovation across the global food system.”
Looking ahead, Proxy Foods AI sees its solution continuing to drive food development and manufacturing transformation as a way to enable R&D teams to create products that were not possible in the past.
Products with multiple simultaneous constraints — high-protein, low-cost, clean-label, allergen-free, increased shelf-life, regionally sourced, and regulatory-compliant across multiple markets — are becoming feasible for the first time. The company projects that nine in ten food companies will be using AI in product development within five years.
I believe the future of food R&D lies in AI-enabled product design, shifting innovation from trial-and-error to predictive science. Proxy Foods is redefining how food companies enhance today’s portfolios while designing the next generation of products, making innovation faster, smarter, and more future-ready. Maria Velissariou, member of Proxy Foods AI advisory board, former CSO Mars, R&D leadership roles at Pepsi Co and Kraft Heinz (Maria Velissariou | LinkedIn).
In addition to Ted Leonsis, Robert G. Hisaoka, and SWaN & Legend Venture Partners, Proxy Foods AI investors include: Ike Grigoropoulos, Ted Xenohristos, Dimitri Moshovitis, and the late Richard Ware, Howard Eisenberg (Mentor at the Good Food Institute, Founder & Former President, Eurosort and United Sortation Solutions, Board Member at Halcyon House), Jeff Skoll, Roger W. Ferguson Jr. (Immediate past CEO and President, TIAA), Michelle Freeman (Owner & CEO, Carl M. Freeman Companies), Yiannis Gavrielides (Co-Founder, CEO, Covve, Managing Partner, Invelopment Partners), Evee & Alexander Georgiadis (Owners of Krinos Foods Canada), Chris Goulakos (Founder & Managing Partner, Balius Partners), George P. Stamas (Senior Partner, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and Board President at THI), Grant Verstandig (Founder, Chairman & CEO, Red Cell Partners).
About Proxy Foods AI
Headquartered in Washington, D.C., with labs and offices in San Francisco and in Greece, Proxy Foods AI is the world’s leading AI platform for food & beverage product development and formulation, empowering global CPG, foodservice, and ingredient companies to move from concept to commercialization with unprecedented speed and precision. The company’s mission: make food and beverage development a force for good: for people, the planet, and future generations. For more information, visit proxyfoods.ai.
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