2nd Nature—a startup using AI to identify high-value ingredients from abundant ag side streams—will launch its first products for commercial sampling this quarter: non-caloric natural sweeteners and umami flavor enhancers that help firms reduce sodium. The tech creates a path to more rapid commercialization of natural ingredients by using AI to search for small molecules, fibers, peptides, enzymes, and proteins based on functional property prediction, says cofounder and CEO Effendi Leonard, PhD. “Our AgWaste Portal identified these compounds in the byproducts of crops like wheat, soy, rice, peanut, and corn that food manufacturers already process in massive quantities and currently pay to dispose of their side streams. “What’s exciting is that these ingredients are hidden in plain sight and we can produce them at scale and at low cost,” adds Leonard, who started his career at gas fermentation firm Calysta and has since worked at synthetic biology co Ginkgo Bioworks, crop protection firm Provivi, and plant cell culture startup Ayana Bio. “We have developed internal training sets to map the molecular universe in ag side streams to predict their functions.” The AgWaste Portal combines machine-learning taste prediction models, embedding- and structure-based algorithms, and sequence similarity searches, adds Leonard, who cofounded Cincinnati-based 2nd Nature in 2023 with Reed Doyle and David Groshoff. “The beauty of this tool is that it can score the utility of these different models differently so that we achieve an optimum discovery of the molecules, which increases our success rate or accuracy of the model.” The business…
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