USA – Perfect Day, a California-based dairy alternatives startup has raised US$140 million in Series C Funding round led by Singapore’s investment giant Temasek to help commercialize its ingredients and expand its footprint.
The funding round is more than twice what the company raised since its inception and brings Perfect Day’s total funding to US$201.5 million. According to a Financial Times report, the startup has been valued at US$440m during this round.
In this funding round, both Temasek and Horizons Ventures—who led Perfect Day’s Series B funding earlier this year—have returned to support the company’s growth, alongside past investors.
Established in 2014, Perfect Day utilises fermentation processes to convert plant sugar into milk proteins, such as whey and casein, to produce cheese, yogurt and ice cream. The founders say that the key to making products that truly taste like dairy is milk proteins.
“In 2019, we showed that our manufacturing process works robustly at commercial scale,” said Ryan Pandya, CEO and Co-founder of Perfect Day.
“We were able to demonstrate with our ice cream launch—which sold out in a single day—that flora-based protein delivers on the dairy experience, and that people are excited about what we’re doing.
“Our focus in 2020 will be manufacturing and commercializing the protein in multiple continents, through multiple partnerships spanning different dairy product categories.”
The startup is poised for growth in an increasingly crowded market, with companies racing to disrupt traditional dairy industry and offer consumers more sustainable, environmentally conscious alternatives that don’t compromise on taste.
In July this year, the company launched the world’s first animal free dairy ice cream as a bundle of three flavours: Milky Chocolate, Vanilla Salted Fudge and Vanilla Blackberry Toffee.
Perfect Day envisions a bright future of the dairy industry and plans to work with companies at various capacities that can create delicious food products using the animal proteins. The company plans to announce its first commercial partnerships early in 2020.
The startup is also working with agribusiness giant, ADM, which already has industrial fermentation infrastructure, so that it can help drive down the cost of production and avoid building that infrastructure itself.
At scale, the company Perfect Day claims that its dairy-free products can be as much as 40% cheaper than milk protein from cows while at the same time reducing environmental impacts.
In an early life-cycle analysis that compared a gallon of milk from a cow to a gallon of its own product, the company found that it could eliminate the vast majority of the water and land used on a dairy farm, along with more than 80% of the greenhouse gas emissions.
The new funding will also help the company continue to refine its products, including an animal-free version of milk fat that it recently developed.
