NotCo, a food technology company making plant-based milk and meat replacements, wrapped up another funding round this year, a $235 million Series D round that gives it a $1.5 billion valuation. Tiger Global led the round and was joined by new investors, including DFJ Growth Fund, the social impact foundation, ZOMA Lab; athletes Lewis Hamilton and Roger Federer; and musician and DJ Questlove. Follow-on investors included Bezos Expeditions, Enlightened Hospitality Investments, Future Positive, L Catterton, Kaszek Ventures, SOSV and Endeavour Catalyst. This funding round follows an undisclosed investment in June from Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer through his firm EHI. In total, NotCo, with roots in both Chile and New York, has raised more than $350 million, founder and CEO Matias Muchnick told TechCrunch.

The plant-based food industry is booming, but there is still some disconnect in how plant-based options look and taste compared to their animal-made counterparts. Experts in the food industry believe artificial intelligence (AI) is that missing ingredient. Food-tech company NotCo recently released its plant-based milk, called NotMilk, that looks and tastes like dairy milk, to Whole Foods stores nationwide. The company has mastered the art of creating plant-based foods that taste, feel, and look just like their animal-based counterparts using AI. "To me, you have more than 400,000 species of plants in this world that you can explore, and we have no idea what they can do," NotCo founder and CEO Matias Muchnick told Lifewire in a phone interview.

The first food product invented by an artificial intelligence (AI) system can already be obtained in Argentina. And with this specific meal, AI shows that it can already revolutionize a productive item that, until now, was conservative: the food industry. Dictating an email to the smartphone, driverless cars or combat drones that choose a target and fire without a commander's order are already common. The novelty is that, in laboratories and companies, computational techniques of Machine Learning and Big Data are already used to create new -and recreate old- foods using absolutely novel ingredients. For example, a Chilean startup has just presented in the local market a mayonnaise that has the same taste, smell, color and texture as the traditional one.

Remember the last burger you really enjoyed – try to summon up its rich, juicy taste in your mind and its chewy, firm-yet-soft-yet-crunchy texture. Try to recall how the taste filled your mouth with flavour as you bit into it. Remember how satisfying it was. Now think about how it might have tasted without any meat in it. Farming the meat for beef burgers takes a hefty toll on the environment around the world.

The San Francisco–based accelerator IndieBio's Demo Day is delightfully awkward. Finally, with the room settled and the house lights turned down, the CEO of each of the 12 science-focused startups in the program steps to the stage, stumbles through a breathtakingly dense five-minute pitch of mind-bending products like 3-D-printed kidneys, lab-grown fish, and pheromone-based insecticide, and then asks for funding. The halting presentations are symptomatic of the program at IndieBio, which strives to turn scientists with big ideas into successful CEOs within four months. So this September, at IndieBio's Demo Day (the three-year-old accelerator's fifth fundraising event), it was staggering when Matías Muchnick, in a Tasmanian Devil–adorned Hawaiian shirt, gave a clear, concise, funny presentation about the way his company, NotCo, would change the food industry. Most of the IndieBio companies are speculative (the 3-D-printed kidney could be available in seven to 10 years), but NotCo entered the accelerator with a product ready for market. Included in the pitch from Muchnick and his two cofounders--Karim Pichara and Pablo Zamora--was a sample of NotMayo, a vegan mayonnaise currently sold in 220 stores throughout Chile.

SANTIAGO (Reuters) – A Chilean startup that has built artificial intelligence software to help recreate animal-based foods using plants is looking toward U.S. multinationals after signing deals at home to sell its products, the company's founders said. NotCo, founded around a year ago by three Chileans, has already persuaded Cencosud's Jumbo supermarkets to stock its'Not Mayo' across Chile, and has signed a deal to supply a national food manufacturer with one of its products, said Chief Executive Matias Muchnick. The company has also spoken to international companies including Hershey, Coca-Cola and Mars about creating new versions of chocolate and soda. "We want to promote these products as mainstream. It will only have an impact if meat-eaters who don't care about sustainability buy them," said Muchnick, adding that they can be retailed at the same price as the non-vegan version.

Intellectually, many of us know the health and environmental benefits of a plant-based diet, but switching over can be daunting, especially if one hasn't had too much experience with cooking vegetarian or vegan dishes, and also if the tastebuds haven't really gotten used to new flavours. That's why many people may add in some mock meats, just to ease the transition, though whether it actually tastes good and "real" enough is up for debate. Now a team of Chilean scientists is adding technology to the mix, using artificial intelligence to create smarter and better-tasting meat replacements. Founders Matias Muchnick, Karim Pichara and biochemist Isidora Silva of food-tech startup The Not Company are leveraging recent developments in deep learning algorithms to create entirely plant-based foods that are healthy for people, and won't have the huge ecological impact of meat. Muchnick, who is an engineer by training, explains the team's motivation behind their AI model, named Giuseppe: When you get behind the scenes of the food industry, you don't like what you see.

The future of food looks a lot like advanced animal product substitutes; we've already gone beyond tofurkey to plant-based burgers that "bleed." Down in Santiago, Chile, a five-person startup is using machine learning to figure out how to create its own versions of vegetarian substitutes for animal products. Called the Not Company (or NotCo), the one-year-old company is rolling out its first products -- NotMilk, NotMayo. "All I can tell you is that there are some star ingredients ranging from legumes to flowers," NotCo cofounder Matias Muchnick tells Tech Insider. Machine learning, the programming technique where algorithms learn from data sets, has become the hot new thing in Silicon Valley.

What would be the best way to deliver nutrition to the 7.1 billion odd people on this planet? Science would tell you that it is not the animals. Researchers at the Not Company (NotCo) which is a food-tech startup based at Chile have developed food products that is no longer based on animal ingredients but entirely based on plants. They use machine learning technology to develop tasty, nutritious and affordable plant-based food. However, the food looks and tastes like the classic (animal-based) food.