AKA Foods secures $17.2m seed funding to launch world’s first secure AI for food innovation

AKA Foods has announced the official launch of AKA Studio, a proprietary, secure AI platform designed to drastically accelerate product development cycles, following the successful completion of a $17.2 million (£13.8m) seed funding round.

The investment, led by prominent AI experts Alex and Michael Bronstein, is set to introduce a category-defining technology at the intersection of AI, food science, and crucial sensory evaluation, promising to transform how CPG companies research, formulate, and optimise food and beverage products.

AKA Studio is engineered to address the food industry’s struggle to effectively utilise its vast organisational knowledge. The system consolidates a company’s internal R&D, experimental data, ingredient specifications, and regulatory documentation into a structured, unified digital foundation.

Crucially for manufacturers, this foundation explicitly incorporates sensory evaluation and analytical measurements related to texture, aroma, and taste. The platform then deploys sophisticated AI assistants to guide the formulation and optimisation processes.

Key advantages for R&D teams and manufacturers include:

• Speed to market: shortens the innovation cycle from years to mere weeks by providing high-quality decision support.
• Precision reformulation: enables scientific optimisation for key industry challenges, including achieving clean labels, reducing sugar and fat content, and building more resilient supply chains.
• Knowledge assetisation: transforms fragmented internal data into measurable innovation assets, boosting organisational productivity and profitability.

Commenting on the technology, Professor Alex Bronstein, chief scientist at AKA Foods, emphasised the proprietary nature of the system: “AKA Foods is essentially bringing to market a new type of a grammar; a language for food, creating AI agents that are capable of connecting to different external data sources and then making recommendations on how to improve the recipe. This is something that a generic AI model like ChatGPT will never be able to achieve.”

Recognising the competitive nature of formulation data, security and confidentiality are central to AKA Studio’s design.

The platform operates as a secure software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, ensuring clients maintain private environments for their data. For organisations with the highest security standards, the system can be deployed on-premise and air-gapped. AKA Foods guarantees that client data is never shared or used for external model training, and clients retain full ownership and control of their proprietary information.

David Sack, founder & CEO of AKA Foods, stated: “This investment allows us to expand deployment to enterprise clients worldwide and continue advancing the science behind how food is created. AKA Studio gives companies the ability to capture, organise and apply that knowledge securely.”

The underlying Sensory-AI framework is also noted for its potential application in other precision formulation sectors, including flavours.