Food and consumer ingredients · Protein discovery

Shiru

An AI company that mines natural proteins for food functions, then sells the ones that work. Two ingredients reached commercial production in April 2025. Neither has a GRAS notice of its own on file with the FDA.

The fat inside the fried chicken

In March 2023, at the Future Food-Tech conference in San Francisco, Shiru put its first product in front of the industry disguised as a piece of fried chicken. The karaage was plant-based and had been developed by Nourish Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Griffith Foods. The thing on display was not the chicken. It was the fat.

OleoPro is solid at room temperature, browns when cooked, and is built from liquid plant oil trapped in a scaffold of plant protein. Food scientists call that an oleogel. What made this one unusual is how the scaffolding protein was chosen: by machine learning run against a database of natural protein sequences rather than by a food scientist working through candidates.

Three months later, Griffith Foods became the ingredient’s first revenue-generating customer, according to the two companies. Two years after that, in April 2025, Shiru said it had started commercial production and could make thousands of metric tons of OleoPro a year.

Why pea protein keeps failing

The problem Shiru set out to solve is narrower than plant-based meat: the food industry reaches for the same few proteins whatever the job. “Pea protein isn’t designed to behave like an egg protein,” Hume told Business Insider in 2019. Milk proteins coagulate, separate, emulsify and foam. Egg proteins bind and gel. Swapping in a legume isolate and hoping for the same behaviour is, in her account, why so many plant-based cheeses and yogurts disappoint.

Julian Lewis, then Shiru’s vice president of business development, gave GEN the arithmetic in 2022: between 30,000 and 50,000 known edible plants, each carrying tens of thousands of proteins, while rice, wheat and maize supply roughly 60 percent of human calories.

A protein engineer who had never thought about food

Jasmin Hume did her doctorate at New York University in materials chemistry and protein engineering, designing proteins to self-assemble. She had a master’s in materials engineering from Chalmers in Sweden, and she spent a summer as an associate at Lux Capital. Food was not on the list.

Then she spent about three years as director of food chemistry at Hampton Creek, later renamed Just, fractionating plants and studying what their proteins could do. She started Shiru in 2019, launched it out of Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 batch that August, and in October raised a $3.5 million seed led by Lux Capital, the firm where she had interned. Deena Shakir, who led the deal, joined the board.

The name, Lewis told GEN, comes from an old Chinese term meaning “like meat”.

Three years between priced rounds

The $17 million Series A closed in October 2021, led by S2G Ventures. Shiru had 22 employees, planned to double, and was moving into a custom-built headquarters in Alameda. A US patent on the discovery method issued in September 2022. Partnerships with CP Kelco and Puratos followed.

Then the alternative protein funding market turned. AgFunderNews reported in July 2024 that Shiru “engaged in a round of layoffs at the tail end of 2023 in order to conserve cash.” The company’s answer was to sell the tool rather than only the output: in May 2024 it opened its database as ProteinDiscovery.ai, which Hume described as an Amazon for proteins. Ajinomoto Health & Nutrition signed on for sweet proteins in July 2024. A $16 million Series B landed in November 2024, just over three years after the Series A closed.

What followed reads as a company converting a platform into contracts: GreenLab for corn-based protein expression in March 2025, commercial production in April, a GLP-1 Innovation Alliance and a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer listing in June, and a global R&D collaboration with Ingredion on prebiotics in March 2026.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: Shiru has a granted patent, a shipping product, a paying anchor customer and six named corporate partners, which is more than most of its cohort survived with. What it lacks is published evidence that its models beat conventional screening, a headline number that holds still across press cycles, and a regulatory filing of its own. Building on potato protein, which other notifiers already cleared, is a deliberate and legitimate shortcut to market. It is also why there is no FDA record with Shiru’s name on it to examine.

What to watch

• Named customers beyond Griffith Foods, and any revenue disclosure to test the gross-margin-positive claim.
• Whether the GLP-1 Innovation Alliance names members. Founding applications closed August 15, 2025 and none has been named.
• A GRAS notice for any ingredient not already covered by the potato protein precedent.
• The next financing. The Series B was announced in November 2024 and no round has been reported since.
• Whether the Ingredion prebiotics work produces a named commercial ingredient, and on what timeline.

In their words

Shiru funding profile on HVCFHealthcare Venture Capital Fund

Related companies

• Rebellyous Foods: Also in Industrial Bio. A Seattle company that builds the machines that make plant-based chicken, and sells the chicken mostly into school cafeterias
• Future Fields: Shared investor: Company-Stated Partners. An Edmonton company that replaced the steel bioreactor with a genetically engineered fruit fly
• Spero Foods: Also in Industrial Bio. A Bay Area startup that turned sunflower and pumpkin seeds into cream cheese and egg substitutes, reached more than 1,000 US stores, and was sold for cash to a
• CB Therapeutics: Shared investor: Company-Stated Partners. A Carlsbad company that brews cannabinoids, psilocybin and other plant and fungal molecules in engineered yeast

Sources

1. Public recordFDA GRAS Notice Inventory searches for Shiru, OleoPro, uPro and potato proteinFDA · searched Sep 23, 2026
2. Public recordForm D, Gaingels Shiru LLC, CIK 0001963694, and EDGAR full text search for ShiruSEC · filed Apr 20, 2023
3. Public recordPubMed and USAspending.gov searches for Shiru and OleoProNIH and USAspending · Sep 23, 2026
4. Public recordUS Patent 11,439,159, announced with title and inventorsUSPTO · issued Sep 13, 2022
5. Independent10 Start-Ups to Watch 2025: Shiru searches for natural proteinsChemical & Engineering News, Bethany Halford · 2025
6. IndependentA former scientist at one of Silicon Valley’s top food startups just landed $3.5 millionBusiness Insider, Erin Brodwin · Oct 24, 2019
7. InterviewAFN has coffee with Jasmin Hume, founder of alternative protein startup ShiruAgFunderNews, Jessica Pothering · Nov 7, 2019
8. InterviewShiru harnesses AI to launch protein discovery platform: It’s like Amazon for proteinsAgFunderNews, Elaine Watson · May 1, 2024
9. IndependentShiru raises $16m series B to expand AI-powered ingredient discovery platformAgFunderNews, Elaine Watson · Nov 12, 2024
10. IndependentThis Fat Is Made With AI and It Might Just Replace TallowGreen Queen, Anay Mridul · Apr 28, 2025
11. IndependentIngredion Teams Up with Shiru to Advance Gut Health with AI-Discovered Novel ProteinsGreen Queen, Anay Mridul · Mar 19, 2026
12. CompanyShiru launches commercial production of its AI-discovered ingredientsGlobeNewswire · Apr 24, 2025
13. PartnerGriffith Foods Partners with Shiru to Bring Alternative Protein Products to MarketGriffith Foods · 2023
14. CompanyShiru Launches GLP-1 Innovation Alliance, and Shiru Named 2025 Technology Pioneer by World Economic ForumGlobeNewswire · Jun 23 and Jun 24, 2025