Brown Foods, the US- and India-based alt dairy startup, has secured a $2.36 million seed round to accelerate the development of its UnReal milk alternative. Made using cell culture technology without cruelty to cows, Brown Foods claims to be the first company in the US to produce real cow’s milk in this way.
The company states that funding will be used in product development and scaling up its cell cultivation bioprocess, with the goal of taking its first UnReal milk products to market within a few years. Other alt-dairy items including cheese, butter, and ice creams are also in the product pipeline. Investors in the round included Y Combinator – Brown Foods is a recent graduate of its accelerator program, as well as AgFunder and others.

“We validated for the major macronutrients, the proteins, the fats and the carbs,” co-founder Sohail Gupta told TechCrunch. “We could see that the profiles for those were similar to milk at large-scale quantities, and as a result, we could say that we have a superior product from the lab.”