Kingdom Supercultures — $25M Series A round. Why Evolv Ventures invested

By: Steve Sanger, General Partner at Evolv Ventures

Timing is Everything

In September 2020 I had the opportunity to meet Kendall Dabaghi, CEO and co-founder of Kingdom Supercultures. This meeting came at an interesting time for Evolv Ventures. We had just had a potential deal that the entire team was excited about fall through at the final lap. While these things happen in venture capital, it is always disappointing when they do. We were still processing this experience when I got connected to Kendall. To say I wasn’t fired up about chatting with startup founders before our meeting would probably be an understatement.

One conversation with Kendall helped me get out of my short-lived startup malaise. It was one of those conversations that I could not stop thinking about. As investors focused on the entire food value chain, we are well-versed in the challenges food and beverage companies of all sizes face. And Kingdom was addressing a massive problem for all food and beverage companies: how to make product development more efficient, sustainable, and health-conscious. We see CPG companies looking for innovative solutions that address factors including taste, texture, color, and preservation. These challenges become especially apparent as the plant-based sector continues to grow. While we believe plant-based start-ups are integral to making products better-for-you and better-for-the-environment, the impressive tailwinds this sector has had lately could soon be derailed by the simple fact that consumers just do not find many of these products delicious. We believe Kingdom will be a leading player in helping companies achieve the taste and nutrition profiles they are aiming for.

Multiple Strains are King

Kingdom is addressing current challenges within food and beverage by developing customized microbial communities designed intentionally for next-generation fermentation applications. Historically, we have produced fermented foods through the use of particular communities that we discovered accidentally over the course of human history:

Given advances in science and technology, we can now intentionally design these microbial communities for the first time, creating cultures that can address the consistency, speed, and sensory properties of food and beverage fermentation without any genetic engineering. Kingdom is able to do this by leveraging the world’s largest microbial strain bank (all food-safe microbes) alongside high throughput screening and machine learning (ML) to create strain combos optimized for end applications. As Kingdom’s Chief Scientific Officer Ravi Sheth puts it, Kingdom’s lab can be the “Willy Wonka factory for natural foods.”

These advances present an opportunity to address massive challenges within the food and beverage space, taking product development to the next level. For example, these novel cultures can:

• Aid in the development of new foods and form factors that bring consumers novel culinary experiences
• Improve flavors and textures of plant-based and natural food products, making them more likely to be widely adopted
• Help to reduce sugar, salt, and alcohol in traditional product offerings without compromising on taste
• Accelerate nutritional and functional health benefits within all categories of food and beverages
• Assist CPGs in replacing artificial with natural solutions in areas such as preservation and coloring

We see Kingdom’s technology finding use cases for companies of all sizes, from the food tech start-ups we talk to that are creating innovative products to the larger enterprise CPGs that are striving to maintain their competitive edge through product development and diversification. It is this universal appeal (and the fact that Kingdom is actively doing deals with companies from both segments) that showcase how Kingdom’s multiple strain approach will rule.

Why We Invested

When making our investment decision, a few things in particular stood out as we conducted our due diligence:

• Sizeable Market — The markets that Kingdom is going after are massive. The CPG category is large and in need of innovative solutions given changing consumer behaviors. We estimated that the TAM is roughly ~$58B across just a small handful of food and beverage categories, suggesting that the market could be even larger if they were able to penetrate traditional food and beverage spend.
• Few Regulatory Hurdles — Kingdom does not use genetic modification to produce their cultures. As food investors can attest, regulatory can be a long process and is often an investment risk. Because the company uses food-safe microbial strains that are already naturally found in foods, they are able to significantly mitigate regulatory risk.
• Scale-Up Speed — Kingdom’s use of natural microbial strains (as opposed to genetically-modified organisms) will allow for easier and faster scale-up through contract manufacturing. This allows Kingdom to achieve advantages in speed and agility compared to traditional in-house scale-up, which is capital intensive and notoriously slow-moving.
• Opportunity for Disruption — Incumbent culture solutions tend to be focused on one strain to address a specific problem with their infrastructure set up to deliver this solution. Kingdom’s speed, dataset, and ML capabilities allow them to deliver solutions that do not currently exist, suggesting an opportunity to create new categories that disrupt incumbents.

Kingdom’s Top Notch Team

Kingdom was founded by Kendall Dabaghi and Ravi Sheth. Kendall (CEO) has co-founded two startups acquired by public companies and was a microbiome / ML researcher at Columbia, while Ravi (CSO) has been published in Science, Nature Methods and Nature Biotech and was a Hertz Foundation Fellow while at Columbia. They have augmented their impressive backgrounds with a growing team supported by advisors from companies such as Givaudan and P&G as well as from academia (Columbia). Our initial positive impression of the team was corroborated by feedback from their clients, partners, and employees, and we are comfortable with Kendall and Ravi’s ability to bring Kingdom to the next level with the funds from their Series A fundraise.

A Unique Opportunity and a Great Fit for Evolv Ventures

We are incredibly proud to be supporting the Kingdom Supercultures team on their mission to address the largest challenges within the food and beverage industry. Kingdom’s unique technology makes them well positioned to assist food and beverage companies as they launch new products and improve existing categories to efficiently address the changing needs and desires of today’s consumer.