AKA Foods secures $17.2M to launch AI system for food innovation

AKA Foods has announced the completion of a $17.2 million seed funding round led by renowned AI experts and entrepreneurs Alex and Michael Bronstein. The funding marks the official launch of AKA Studio, a secure AI system and proprietary platform that enables food companies to create, optimise, and launch products much faster, smarter, and more affordably than ever before.

Designed to transform how food products are researched, formulated, and developed, AKA Studio consolidates a company’s own knowledge and ongoing R&D into a structured foundation. This incorporates experimental and analytical measurements related to texture, aroma, and taste from dedicated sensory research facilities, before applying AI assistants to guide formulation and optimisation.

For research and development teams, this integration shortens the innovation cycle from years to weeks by combining historical and ongoing R&D data, ingredient specifications, sensory feedback, and regulatory documentation into a unified, intelligent framework. For business leaders, it transforms organisational knowledge into measurable innovation assets that improve productivity and profitability. For investors, it represents a defensible, category-defining technology at the intersection of AI and food science, augmented by sensory evaluation.

Formulation remains a hands-on scientific process. AKA Studio accelerates it and improves decision quality. And, by linking structured digital information with sensory evidence, AKA Studio enables companies to optimise formulations scientifically and bring healthier, more sustainable products to market with greater precision and security. The platform also supports reformulation for clean labels, reduced sugar and fat content, and more resilient supply chains.

Security and confidentiality are central to the system’s design. AKA Studio operates as a secure SaaS platform managed by AKA Foods, giving clients private environments for their data. For organisations with heightened security requirements, it can also be deployed on-premise, air-gapped, under the same protection standards. Client data is never shared or used for model training, and in every case, clients retain full ownership and control of their proprietary information.

Professor Alex Bronstein*, Chief Scientist at AKA Foods, Head of the Center for Intelligent Systems at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and a Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, said: “AKA Foods is essentially bringing to market a new type of a grammar; a language for food, creating AI agents that are capable of connecting to different external data sources and then making recommendations on how to improve the recipe. This is something that a generic AI model like ChatGPT will never be able to achieve.”

David Sack, Founder & CEO of AKA Foods, added: “The global food industry holds enormous amounts of valuable knowledge but struggles to use it effectively. AKA Studio gives companies the ability to capture, organise and apply that knowledge securely. This investment allows us to expand deployment to enterprise clients worldwide and continue advancing the science behind how food is created.”

The underlying sensory-AI framework also holds potential for future applications in flavour, fragrance, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, where sensory evaluation and precision formulation are equally critical.

AKA Studio establishes a new standard for secure, data-driven food innovation, giving research teams, executives, and investors a shared pathway to measurable progress in both science and business performance.

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