Brightseed, a US-based company identifying the presence of plant nutrients, has raised $27m from a consortium including CGC Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of Continental Grain Company.
Venture capital firms Lewis & Clark AgriFood, Seed 2 Growth Ventures, Horizons Ventures, Fifty Years, Germin8 and AgFunder joined the round.
The company had prior undisclosed funding and was launched by former Hampton Creek head of research and development, Jim Flatt.
Flatt told news provider TechCrunch: “This capital raise is going to really allow us to really accelerate that exploration of the dark matter of nutrition. All of these phytonutrients that we know exist. “This forager AI [artificial intelligence] platform that we have built… we’ve developed a proprietary library that’s about five times what the world knows [and] one of the powers of Forager is as we do find known or new compounds we’re able to predict their utility with respect to health.”
The company’s first product is a phytonutrient compound believed to be beneficial to metabolic health and a way to manage and treat fatty liver disease, TechCrunch added.
