Perfect Day Raises $34.7M to Make Animal-Free Milk
Perfect Day Foods raised a massive $34.75 million to complete their Series B funding. Based in Berkeley, California, Perfect Day is a startup that uses cellular agriculture to produce animal-free dairy proteins. By designing yeast to produce the same dairy proteins found in milk from a cow, Perfect Day can make the same milk. Without needing the cow.
Perfect Day’s Series B was led by Temasek Holdings, Horizon Ventures, and Archer Daniel Midland. Temasek previously led Perfect Day’s Series A funding round of $24.7M in February 2018. According to co-founder and CEO Ryan Pandya, that was one of the largest Series A funding rounds ever for a foodtech startup. It is a strong indication of the confidence in Perfect Day’s patented animal-free dairy milk as the future of dairy proteins.
The Series B funding marks a great start to 2019 for Perfect Day following their perfect end to 2018. In November 2018, Perfect Day co-founders Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi were named in Forbes 30-Under-30 list of Social Entrepreneurs. The list commemorates innovative founders and startups, and it’s great to see that Perfect Day’s co-founders were recognized for their hard work.
In addition, Perfect Day announced a partnership with Archer Daniel Midland, one of the world’s largest agricultural processors and food ingredient companies. According to Perfect Day, Archer Daniel Midland’s expertise in scaling fermentation production made them the ideal partner to help Perfect Day get their first product to market. Ryan Pandya also shared that their first product will be an animal-free whey protein. Through the new partnership, Perfect Day aims to be one of the first food cell ag products out. Consumers will have the first chance to see their whey protein as early as this year!
My name is Ahmed Khan, and I am the Editor of CellAgri. Please subscribe to my email newsletter at www.cell.ag to get the latest research and news, which I share exclusively with my email subscribers. We are regularly tweeting out interesting articles and thoughts via twitter @Cellagritech
