A company in Research Triangle Park has raised $24.5 million to support its efforts to develop plant-based sweeteners and prevent crop extinction.
Existing investors, including including Accelr8, Novo Holdings and DCVC Bio, led the Series A round for Elo Life Systems. The funding will support the company's growth as it expands in RTP and moves its food ingredient programs forward.
The raise comes more than a year after Elo spun out of Precision BioSciences (Nasdaq: DTIL). CEO Todd Rands joined Elo in April, a few months after it became a standalone company. Since stepping into the role, Rands has focused on transitioning Elo to be more product focused, while maintaining its research and development engine.
The company is working on two initiatives. First, it's developing a natural, plant-based sweetener that is many times sweeter than sugar, but without the calories. The sweetener ingredient is inspired by monk fruit, a crop that is currently used to make sugar-free sweeteners. However, because the fruit is grown in remote valleys in China, it's hard to access and expensive to process.
Through its technology, Elo is exploring ways to take the same ingredient from monk fruit and produce it in watermelon and other crops that are easier to grow at scale. The juice from these these watermelons and other crops could then be harvested and made available to food and beverage companies.
"We come in and unlock nature's ability to unlock healthy and sustainable ingredients," Rands said. "We can go find ingredients in nature and put them in other food systems so that we can produce at a whole other scale."
Funds from the company's Series A round will support Elo's efforts to build out pilot-scale processing capabilities and conduct market-testing with consumers. The funds will also accelerate the company's regulatory approval efforts in the U.S. Rands said the company plans to begin commercializing its first sweetener product in 2025.
As it moves closer to commercialization, which will be done through partnerships, Elo is already having discussions with food and beverage companies about Elo's work, Rands said.
"There’s a huge trend in food to get out of sugar; even governments and policymakers are pushing in that direction," Rands said. "When we talk to food and beverage companies, they are excited about what we’re doing."
The funding will also support the company's ambitious goal of saving the cavendish banana – the popular variety typically seen in grocery stores – from potential extinction.
Elo in 2020 entered a strategic partnership with the global producer Dole Food Co. to develop banana varieties that are resistant to a fungus that's devastating to the fruit. Rands said Elo is moving toward testing its banana varieties in real-world field trial evaluations in Central America.
The company is expanding locally as it moves these programs forward. Elo has added about 50 percent more space to its facility at 5 Laboratory Drive in Research Triangle Park. In addition to the 25,000 square feet of office and lab space the company leases, Elo recently opened about 10,000 square feet of greenhouse space in RTP.
Elo is also hiring. Rands said the company's headcount of 31 could grow by about 50 percent in the next year.
Elo expects to follow up this round of funding by opening a Series B round later this year. Rands said the company has not yet shaped with the size of this raise could look like. However, the funding would allow the company to further scale and commercialize its sweetener products and to expand its research and development pipeline with additional sustainable ingredients.
"We have other areas of focus in our research and development pipeline," Rands said. "We've got some interesting things coming together."
