Proxy Foods AI has raised $6 million in a seed funding round to expand its artificial intelligence platform for food and beverage research and development. The round was led by Ted Leonsis — founder, chairman, managing partner and CEO of Monumental Sports & Entertainment — with lead participation from Robert G. Hisaoka and SWaN & Legend Venture Partners.
The company said it will use the capital to expand its food science, regulatory and commercialization capabilities and to grow its enterprise customer base globally.
Proxy Foods AI platform and customer impact
Proxy Foods AI offers an agentic AI platform that helps food manufacturers, ingredient suppliers and restaurant companies move products from concept through formulation and commercialization. Customers named by the company include Barilla, Gefsinus and CAVA; the firm also works with MISTA, an innovation platform owned by Givaudan, and previously won a Demo Day competition at Tyson Foods. The company said the average platform customer generates more than $1 billion in annual revenue.
According to Proxy Foods AI, the platform draws on institutional knowledge stored in disconnected files and past research projects to predict formulation performance before benchtop trials begin. Customers have reportedly cut product-development iterations by up to 80%, lowered cost of goods by 2% to 10% during reformulations, and shortened prototype timelines from months to days. The platform is designed to support simultaneous objectives such as higher protein content, lower cost, cleaner labels, allergen restrictions, longer shelf life, regional sourcing and regulatory compliance.
Research, partnerships and security
Proxy Foods AI has established research collaborations with Stanford University and Food System Innovations that produced product-optimization models based on Expert Guided Bayesian Optimization; the company said those models achieved near-perfect matching of sensory characteristics. It is also participating in a Good Food Institute-backed project with the Federal University of Paraná and McGill University focused on AI-driven cell culture media for cultivated meat.
A partnership with Aperio Global adds a zero-trust, quantum-resilient security layer designed to support computation on encrypted data without exposing proprietary formulations.
Other investors named in the round include Jeff Skoll, Roger Ferguson Jr., Michelle Freeman, Grant Verstandig and several executives from the food, technology and financial sectors.
“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.”
Panos Kostopoulos, CEO 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.”
Ted Leonsis, Co-Founder and Lead Board Director of Proxy Foods AI
