Shiru, The Protein Discovery Company, is launching the world’s first marketplace and discovery platform for proteins. ProteinDiscovery.ai lets anyone search, discover, pilot, and buy molecules for food, agriculture, personal care, and advanced material applications.
Shiru’s marketplace and discovery model is an industry first, allowing large incumbents, startups and researchers to unlock the power of proprietary, trained AI models, an extensive database of natural protein sequences, and automated biochemistry workflows via a simple web interface.
The searchable database catalogs more than 33 million molecules by sequence, functional use, and successful expression. Shiru’s discovery tool links natural protein sequences with novel applications, creating new intellectual property of bio-based ingredients at the speed of search. Shiru’s infrastructure will allow companies to purchase and secure intellectual property rights in perpetuity.
“With ProteinDiscovery.ai we’ve made the world of natural proteins for industrial applications accessible. We’ve even added the ability for users to easily purchase samples, creating the ‘Amazon for proteins,’” said Shiru Founder and CEO Dr. Jasmin Hume. “We’ve been using AI to identify high-value, novel, scalable proteins for years, fueling our own product development. With significant recent interest from CPGs and ingredients companies alike, we decided to open our toolbox to everyone.”
The unveiling of ProteinDiscovery.ai marks a significant expansion for Shiru beyond food. Shiru’s dual platform approach disrupts both discovery and go-to-market for protein-based products, providing access to natural and disruptive bio-based products as simple as ecommerce.
ProteinDiscovery.ai can save companies millions of dollars in R&D costs — and years of work — towards accelerating the transition to better bio-based products. Whether the challenge is finding a sweet protein with a clean label and high stability, plant proteins that mimic casein, clean-label methylcellulose replacements, or ice structuring proteins, Shiru’s tools make search and development of new products across various high value applications extremely straightforward.
Founded in 2019 to disrupt the discovery of natural products by harnessing AI and synthetic biology, Shiru provides startups and incumbents the unique opportunity to purchase or license patented, de-risked protein solutions ready to scale. Shiru has already forged partnerships with global multinationals including Puratos, and Griffith Foods via its CVC fund, Nourish Ventures, to discover, pilot, and scale sustainable food ingredients.
One ingredient on Shiru’s partnership platform, OleoPro, uses plant-based proteins to create protein scaffolds that structure liquid oils. OleoPro, which just received a patent from the USPTO, is a high-performance, structured fat that replaces unsustainable tropical oils including palm, coconut oil, and cocoa butter in food and personal care. The highly tunable protein technology powering OleoPro allows oils to be used in new ways to deliver a range of previously impossible functionality for food and consumer products while reducing saturated fat by over 80%.
OleoPro, and the active protein ingredient it contains, uPro, are now also available on Novi Connect, expanding Shiru’s reach into the cosmetics industry.
