Food safety and analytics platform Clear Labs announced it has closed on $21 million through a Series B2 led by Menlo Ventures and including Wing VC, Dentsu Ventures, Felicis, Khosla, and multiple food production companies.

Founded in 2014, Clear Labs is the only automated food safety platform for routine pathogen detection. Its Clear Safety platform, which was launched in July of this year, offers the combination of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), advanced microbiology, robotic automation, data science and software analytics, and is able to provide 99 percent accuracy at significantly lower costs.

“Clear Labs aims to improve the safety of the food we all eat every day,” said Greg Yap, partner at Menlo Ventures. “Their unique platform leverages advanced sequencing technology and data science to provide better pathogen testing solutions, reduce disease outbreaks, and unlock additional opportunities to improve sustainability, agriculture, and nutrition.”

This new platform, which currently supports high-volume testing for salmonella with additional pathogens and software features expected to be added in 2019, engages in learning – collecting millions of data points per analysis that serve multiple purposes: to learn everything about a pathogen in a single test, and to serve as a foundation for new applications, including predictive risk assessment, nutrigenomics, and new product development.

“This round of funding was raised on the premise that what the industry needs is perfectly aligned with our product vision,” said Sasan Amini, CEO of Clear Labs. “Food manufacturers and microbiology labs alike recognize that targeted NGS technology will not just fill the gaps left by legacy pathogen testing technologies like PCR, but propel the entire industry towards a failsafe food system.”

Going High Tech

In an age when food recalls and food safety scares not only endanger the consumer, but also have the ability to decimate a food or beverage company, food safety tech has become critical to production operations. As a result, the technologies behind the science have advanced at an accelerated rate and investors are taking note of the potential for return on investment that can be generated from a guaranteed safe food supply chain.

Another recent investment round in a cutting-edge food safety company occurred earlier this month,  when S2G Ventures and Bunge Ventures, the venture capital arm of Bunge Limited, led a $10 million equity financing round for SafeTraces, Inc. Also participating in the round were UL Ventures and Spero Ventures.

Founded in Pleasanton, California, in 2015, SafeTraces is the only provider of on-food safety solutions using FDA-approved, food grade DNA technology that enables complete traceability and sanitation verification. To accomplish this, the company employs SafeTracers™ – edible, flavorless, and invisible DNA barcodes that are applied directly on or with food items instead of food packaging.

Together with blockchain technology, or a centralized code registry system, an unbreakable, scalable, and cost-effective link is established with each item. This link allows producers, processors, and distributors to trace food in minutes for full transparency into its source, purity, and safety.   

A Clear Leader

Typically, sequencing an entire genome has been the most recent methodology for food safety testing. However, through Clear Labs’ NGS platform, testers are able to examine only specific and required gene sequences, instead of the entire genome, reducing lead time to 24 hours or less, Mahni Ghorashi, co-founder and chief commercial officer of Clear Labs, told Food Dive. By using NGS, Clear Labs also is able to identify the exact strain of salmonella, or other pathogen present in a food sample without resorting to sequencing an entire genome.

Through an initial pilot program, Clear Labs enrolled companies representing 90 percent of the U.S. poultry market, 85 percent of the pet food market, and 50 percent of the U.S.’s third-party service labs. Currently, the company is conducting evaluations in preparation for general availability, while Ghorashi told Food Dive that federal agencies have also shown an interest in the technology.

The company plans to use the capital from this round to fund the acceleration of its commercialization process, and to build out new features for its Clear Safety platform.

“This round of funding will help us fulfill all of our customers’ needs and prepare for mass commercialization,” said Amini.

Lynda Kiernan