Rahul Ray is investment lead and senior director of Tyson Ventures, the corporate venturing arm for protein-based food processing firm Tyson Foods, since 2020. During his tenure, Tyson Ventures has invested nearly $100m in startups focused on emerging proteins, new technologies for food and worker safety and sustainable food production.
Founded in December 2016 with $150m of capital, Tyson Ventures partners and invests in promising entrepreneurial businesses that align with US-based Tyson Foods’ corporate strategy and can benefit from the firm’s expertise and scale.
Among the unit’s recent investments are in the $347m series B raise for Future Meat Technologies, an Israeli firm using cellular agriculture to replace animal-based foods, and participation in the $10m series B round for food industry automation specialist Soft Robotics, which is headquartered in Massachusetts.
Ray serves as a board observer for a number of Tyson Ventures portfolio companies: these include productivity smartwatch maker Iterate Labs, online storefront developer Rejoicy, mushroom ingredient developer MycoTechnology, Future Meat Technologies, and Soft Robotics.
The unit also committed to venture capital firm Big Idea Ventures’ New Protein Fund I as a limited partner in 2019. Big Idea is concentrating on plant-based food, alternative protein and ingredient developers and is operating accelerators in the US and Singapore, and makes direct equity investments.
Ray joined Tyson from a diverse professional background in areas including investment management, banking, corporate finance and engineering at hedge funds, brokerage Sanford C Bernstein, investment bank Morgan Stanley and supply chain services group XPO Logistics.
He holds an MBA from Columbia Business School, a master of science in computer engineering from University of California, Santa Barbara, and a bachelor of science in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.
