It looks like a sci-fi movie script, but the American agtech Air Protein proposition is just that: create alternative proteins not from plants, as we have seen many other farms, but from the air. The idea sparked investor interest and the Californian company received an investment of $ 32 million, according to information from the AgFunder News website. The funds will be used to create your innovation, research and development laboratory, accelerate the product creation and marketing process and hire more staff for the team. The fundraising round was entirely virtual due to the pandemic and included the participation of ADM Ventures, Barclays and GV, a venture capital fund linked to Google. And how does agtech manage to create protein from air? To start, they combine carbon dioxide, oxygen and hydrogen, elements present in the air we breathe, with water and mineral nutrients. From there, they use renewable energy and a probiotic production process in which cultures convert these elements into essential amino acids. "The result is a nutritious source of proteins with the same amino acid profile as animal protein," says CEO, Lysa Dyson, in an interview with AgFunder. To give the meat the same flavor, agtech uses a combination of techniques that Dyson compares with cooking, such as turning wheat flour into pasta. Using pressure and temperature, they can reproduce the flavor and texture profile of animal protein. For now, the project is still under development. The structure for producing these proteins is similar to vertical farms and, according to Dyson, can be easily built anywhere in the world, in a few days. “It is an extremely scalable and sustainable project”, he says.
This text was translated by machine from Brazilian Portuguese.