Startup Battlefield firm ÄIO invented a technique to make edible fats from ag waste like sawdust

Äio (pronounced EYE-oh) is the Estonian god of desires. It appears a sweetly applicable namesake for a rising startup, referred to as ÄIO, from that tiny Baltic nation that has developed a course of to show agricultural waste like sawdust into fat for the meals and beauty industries.

This course of may very well be a method to cut back the world’s dependency on palm oil, which has turn out to be a staple for meals and cosmetics for its emulsifying and preservative properties. Sadly, as a result of of that plant’s want for scorching humid climates, this huge business has additionally notoriously destroyed rain forests and different delicate ecosystems to make approach for farms.

ÄIO was co-founded by biotechnology scientists Nemailla Bonturi and Petri-Jaan Lahtvee based mostly on Bonturi’s doctoral analysis. Throughout her research she invented a brand new microbe, a pressure of yeast. As a substitute of consuming sugar and outputting carbon dioxide fuel or alcohol as with bread and beer, this yeast consumes sugar and outputs fats molecules. The corporate will showcase its tech as a part of Startup Battlefield at this yr’s TechCrunch Disrupt, which runs later this month in San Francisco.

Lahtvee was a professor of Meals Tech and Bioengineering at Estonia’s Tallinn College of Expertise and, in 2016, operating his personal biotech lab there with Bonturi his first rent. She introduced her microbe with her, they usually labored on the molecule, altering it to be hardy sufficient to be manufactured.

As Estonia has a massive agriculture base of corn and different meals grains, in addition to sugarcane and lumber, the lab studied how sugars produced from these ag waste streams may feed this microbe. “We began engaged on it, growing metabolic engineering instruments,” Lahtvee instructed TechCrunch. The reply: It may eat these sugars fairly nicely.

The molecule’s “fats profile is similar to present fat,” Lahtvee says, and, in its solid-fat type, in all probability “most intently resembles rooster fats.” However it’s additionally doable to modify the fermentation course of to provide a liquid oil as nicely that might make it a good various to manufactured oils like canola/rapeseed oil.

In 2022, the founders knew they’d a commercially viable answer and launched ÄIO with the hope of elevating enterprise cash and establishing industrial partnerships to convey it to market. They’ve raised about $7 million thus far and, since founding, have created strategies for growing precision fermentation merchandise, gained the 2024 Baltic Sustainability Award, and signed over 100 corporations worldwide concerned about collaboration, the startup says.

“We’ve got a really in depth evaluation after we make our product and, thus far, what now we have seen is that our ultimate product is to the identical degree as vegetable oils, apart from the pesticides — even extra pure,” Bonturi instructed TechCrunch.

Subsequent up, the firm plans to construct a facility to provide the fats in industrial portions by 2027, in addition to license the expertise to different beauty and meals producers. It additionally should acquire licenses to promote the fat as meals, nation by nation, most probably beginning with Singapore, which has a historical past of being extra open to various meals manufacturing merchandise.

“In fact, it’s a novel sort of approach of manufacturing meals, and we must undergo all of the permits and evaluation,” Bonturi mentioned.

As such plans progress, Bonturi mentioned that she hopes to indicate how “two scientists on this small nation may really do one thing higher for the world, however that’s simply my private dream.”