One of the ag tech earth's few unicorns is spinning off a new food ingredients company chosen Motif Ingredients with a $90 1000000 Series A.

Motif will leverage intellectual holding and facilities from its parent company Ginkgo Bioworks, which was terminal valued in 2022 at $one.38 billion, when it raised a $275 one thousand thousand Series D. Gingko is known for the ability to chop-chop produce Deoxyribonucleic acid for applications from microbes that supervene upon fertilizer to ones that produce perfume fragrances. At Motif, that technology will be inserted into yeast cells. The yeast is then fermented, every bit in beer brewing, except that instead of producing alcohol, the yeast creates whatever by-product Motif'due south customers want. These ingredients can be customized to mimic flavors or textures similar to those found in protein products like beef and dairy—a potential game-changer for the budding manufacture of plant-based foods, which has seen everything from burgers to cheese alternatives gain popularity in recent years.

Accept Impossible Foods, backed by top investors from Bill Gates to GV. Its soy-and-vegetable-based burger withal bleeds like the traditional beef version because of an added ingredient called heme, a molecule establish in virtually all living plants and animals. Incommunicable'southward products rely on this ingredient, which is hard to source. Simply, as Jason Kelly, Ginkgo Bioworks cofounder and CEO says, Impossible doesn't manufacture its own heme in-house. And that's where labs like Motif come in.

"Instead of making another Incommunicable, we'll exist an ingredient supplier. Nosotros'll supply the Impossible nugget or the egg-free any. There are many people who take branding and nutrient development expertise who'd honey to make new products in this infinite, only simply a scattering take the funding to do," says Kelly. "We're focused on what y'all'd add together to the existing supply chain to make it better. All these companies need information technology to brand a veggie fish stick that tastes good."

Motif investors include Quantum Energy Ventures, Louis Dreyfus Cos., Fonterra and Viking Global Investors.

Ginkgo Bioworks was showtime founded in 2008, based largely on inquiry adult at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by scientist Tom Knight, ane of the company's cofounders who came to biological science after decades of work as a computer scientist. Knight's philosophy of constructed biology is to treat it as akin to computer programming, and Kelly sees his company as existence a biological programmer.

"Nosotros're like app developers writing a microbial app," he said. "And our customers come up to united states and say, 'Hey tin can you brand me an app that does this?'"

This is Ginkgo'southward second spin-off. In 2017, Ginkgo formed a articulation venture with Bayer called Joyn Bio, which leverages the visitor's avails and IP to create microbes that can replace or supplement fertilizer for different crops. That company kicked off with a $100 meg Series A round with investments from its parent companies and Viking Global Investors LP. Similarly, Kelly sees Motif every bit a visitor that will operate in the aforementioned way for food ingredients, and he expects that as Ginkgo grows, it volition spin out others. "We want to keep, in many, many verticals, popping business up that have access to our platform and enquire for specs in different markets."