Nuritas raises €16m in Series A funding

21 Dec 2017 --- Nuritas has announced the close of a circa €16 million (US$19 million) Series A funding round led by Chicago-based Cultivian Sandbox Ventures. This brings the total invested to date to approximately €25 million, the company reports. The latest round of funding will support Nuritas’ global growth to address and solve many of the most pressing health issues of the day, including the diabetes epidemic.

“Nuritas’ unique platform delivers truly life-changing health benefits, and we are very pleased to be involved in its growth – it’s a brilliant team and such an exciting technology,” says Nick Rosa, Managing Director of Cultivian Sandbox and Co-founder of Sandbox Industries. “We expect Nuritas to quickly emerge as one of the most innovative companies in the world, effecting real change.”

Since launching in 2014, Nuritas has grown rapidly with its AI-powered peptide discovery platform, with applications spanning health and wellness, pharmaceuticals, agriculture and dermatology amongst others, attracting high-profile investors and partners, including BASF SE.

“In an effort to expand our health solutions, we searched the globe trying to find such an innovative discovery technology, and we eventually found it with Nuritas,” says Michael De Marco, Global Head, Research & Development Human Nutrition and Pharma Solutions, BASF SE. “The most immediate fruits of our collaboration will be the US launch of an anti-inflammatory for sports nutrition in 2018. This is only the beginning, our collaboration is progressing and on track to yield more groundbreaking products in the future.” 

Another area of strong and sustained focus for Nuritas is diabetes, which is a major societal issue. The company received a Horizon 2020 grant that has unlocked €3 million (US$3.52 million) to advance one of its discoveries in the area of pre-diabetes. 

“That’s in human clinical trials at the moment, and the endpoint for that is an article 13.5 health claim submission, which is going to be a first-of-its-kind ingredient,” Nuritas Commercial Manager Neil Foster told NutritionInsight in an earlier interview. 

“Bioactive peptides are known to play a role in managing diabetes and many other areas, but the current methods of identifying those that may work is time-consuming, inefficient and expensive,” says Emmet Brown, CEO of Nuritas. “Our artificial intelligence platform has already disrupted this antiquated process by targeting, predicting and unlocking peptides that can positively impact in conditions like pre-diabetes while reducing the cost and time needed to find them. We’re excited to have Cultivian Sandbox  and others join our mission to unlock these huge capabilities to improve human and animal health.”

Nuritas Founder and Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Nora Khaldi states, “This investment will not only help us accelerate our route to market, explore new disease areas and grow our already strong team, but it will also push us even further in extracting the great potential of what our technology is capable of creating. What is so exciting is that the inflammation ingredient launching in the US next year is actually the first healthcare ingredient that has been fully discovered through the use of Artificial intelligence.”

Nuritas uses a proprietary AI and genomics platform to rapidly analyze the billions of molecules and peptides in food to predict and identify how they impact specific health areas, molecular pathways or receptors. When compared to traditional discovery methods, the Nuritas platform has been shown to identify peptides ten times faster and 500 times more accurately while significantly reducing costs.