BOULDER, CO — Bond Pet Foods, a Boulder-based company creating meat proteins through fermentation for pet food applications, has raised $17.5 million in a funding round.
The Series A funding will be used to expand Bond’s meat protein portfolio and scale up production at a new 15,000-square-foot facility in central Boulder, according to a press release. It will also allow Bond to more than triple the size of its team, strengthening its science, technical and regulatory competency.
The round includes investment from ADM Ventures (Archer Daniels Midland Company) and Cavallo Ventures (Wilbur Ellis); institutional funds Genoa Ventures and Lever VC; food/tech and sustainability investors Thia Ventures, iSelect Fund, Stage 1 Fund, Lifely VC and Satori Capital, as well as music icons Sia Isabelle Furler and Joan Jett.
“We’re excited to be a part of this next chapter of Bond Pet Foods’ growth,” said Jorge Martinez, president of Pet Solutions for ADM. “Pet nutrition, with industry sales at $100 billion and growing at 4.5% a year, is an important growth pillar for ADM. More and more, consumers demand their pets eat the same sustainable, responsibly-produced food that they themselves eat, and proteins produced by precision fermentation are key to being part of the future of the industry. We’ve expanded our capabilities in these categories and are proud to be part of the Bond Pet Foods journey, as they offer new opportunities to bring these growth trends together.”
More from the release:
Bond Pet Foods was founded in 2017 with a mission to create more sustainable, responsible, and humane food by reimagining meat, the mainstay of our pets’ diets. Dogs and cats are voracious consumers of animal proteins. However, studies show that the production of meat and meat by-products for their consumption has an oversized impact on the environment: if America’s 163 million dogs and cats were their own country, their consumption of meat products would rank fifth in the world, and up to 30% of meat production’s negative effects (land, water, energy use) can be attributed to satiating this demand.
Bond is solving for this by employing precision fermentation to produce nutritionally complete, nature-identical chicken, beef, fish and other meat proteins for pet food applications. Bond’s production process is safe and established, similar to that routinely used to make common food ingredients such as lactic acid, vitamin B12 and enzymes for cheese production- no animal farming required.
“The company’s recent achievements on strain development and cost, as well as their expanding relationships with global strategic partners, have validated Bond’s technology platform and their ability to usher in a new era of responsible protein for our pets,” said Jenny Rooke, Managing Director of Genoa Ventures. “We’re bullish about Bond’s approach and their potential to change the pet food supply chain for the better.”
“We’re thrilled to welcome this diverse, world-class coalition of investors into the Bond family,” added Rich Kelleman, CEO and Co-Founder of Bond Pet Foods. “With their support we’ll be able to take our work to the next level, developing and scaling a variety of meat proteins for our valued partners in the pet food space.”
Prior to this Series A round, Bond raised $2.5MM from investors including Lever VC, Agronomics, KBW Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures and Trellis Road, bringing its total funding to-date to $20MM. In November of last year Bond also announced an industry-first partnership with Hill’s Pet Nutrition, to develop a craft meat protein for its product portfolio.
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