The race to build smarter, healthier, and more sustainable food products is moving faster than ever, and a new wave of AI tools is beginning to reshape how global brands approach research and development. One startup making a bold entrance into this space is AKA Foods, which just raised $17.2 million to launch its AI food innovation platform, AKA Studio.
The company wants to compress product development cycles from years to only a few weeks, and it believes that R&D teams can unlock huge value simply by organising the knowledge they already have.
Food companies often struggle with scattered internal data, inconsistent sensory evaluations, and slow formulation processes. These gaps make innovation expensive and unpredictable.
AKA Studio was built to tackle this head-on by bringing every insight, every sensory result, and every experiment into one secure system. By blending human sensory expertise with advanced AI, the platform helps teams redesign recipes, optimise formulations, and move products to market much faster.
The company was founded in 2021 by David Sack and Professor Alex Bronstein after what started as a simple attempt to create the perfect vegan pizza cheese. That small experiment uncovered a much larger industry problem. Most food companies sit on years of valuable institutional knowledge, yet very little of it is accessible in a structured way.
Sack and Bronstein realised that without a unified system, teams keep repeating the same experiments, extending timelines and increasing costs. This insight shaped the foundation of AKA Studio.
Their platform is built around a sensory-AI framework that analyses data on texture, aroma, taste, and other sensory markers collected from dedicated lab setups. This data is then paired with AI models that recommend adjustments and predict how small formulation changes will affect the final product.
The goal is to help companies move from guesswork to precision, enabling them to design healthier, cleaner-label products with less sugar, less fat, and fewer additives while keeping flavour and functionality intact.
Sack noted that the global food industry sits on enormous knowledge, but struggles to use it effectively. The problem isn’t a lack of data , it’s fragmentation.
AKA Studio aims to change that by making every piece of information searchable, explainable, and usable for future product development. Unlike general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT, the platform uses a specialised “language for food” that connects to internal and external datasets with a focus on generating actionable R&D insights.
Security is a central part of the design. The AI food innovation platform runs as a private SaaS environment with strict data ownership controls, and enterprise customers can even deploy it on-premises in fully isolated, air-gapped setups. In an industry where intellectual property is everything, this level of security is often non-negotiable.
Although other startups like Bettani, Above Food, Fooditive, Umiami, Black Sheep Foods, and Nuttin Ordinary also serve the food innovation market, most of them focus on plant-based or alternative protein products. AKA Foods is taking a broader approach.
It wants to give every food company, from global manufacturers to mid-sized brands, the tools to innovate with greater accuracy and speed, regardless of the category.
With the $17.2 million seed round led by Alex and Michael Bronstein, AKA Foods is stepping into global markets with plans to expand into new industries. The same sensory-AI foundation powering food development can also be applied to flavours, fragrances, cosmetics, and even pharmaceuticals, where precise sensory characteristics matter just as much.
The long-term ambition is to redefine how companies build the next generation of consumer products by turning fragmented R&D knowledge into a strategic advantage.
