The äio (pronounced eye-oh) is the Estonian god of dreams. It looks like a sweetly suitable homonymous for a growing start -up, called äio, from that tiny Baltic country that has developed a process to convert agricultural waste such as Sawdust into fats for the food and cosmetics industries.
This process could be one way to reduce the world’s dependence on palm oil, which has become essential to food and cosmetics for its emulsifying and conservative properties. Unfortunately, due to the need for this plant for warm wet climates, this huge industry has also destroyed rain forests and other sensitive ecosystems to pave the way for holdings.
Äio was founded by biotechnology scientists Nemailla Bonturi and Petri-Jaan Lahtvee based on Bonturi’s doctoral research. During her studies, a new germ, a dough strain was invented. Instead of consuming sugar and production of carbon dioxide or alcohol such as bread and beer, this dough consumes sugar and extracts fat molecules. The company will highlight its technology as part of the Battlefield Startup at this year’s TechCrunch, which is running later this month in San Francisco.
Lahtvee was a professor of food and biomedical technology at Estonia Technology University in Estonia and in 2016 he runs his own biotechnology workshop there with Bonturi, his first lease. She brought her the germ with her and worked on the molecule, changing it to be durable enough to build.
As Estonia has a large agricultural base of corn and other food grains, as well as sugar cane and timber, the laboratory studied how sugars produced by these AG waste currents could supply this germ. “We started working on it, developing tools of metabolic engineering,” Lahtvee told TechCrunch. The answer: It could consume these sugars quite well.
The “fat fat profile is very similar to existing fats,” says Lahtvee and, in the form of solid fat, probably “more like chicken fat”. But it is also possible to modify the fermentation process to produce a liquid oil that could make a good alternative to made of made oils such as an oil/cat.
In 2022, the founders knew that they had a commercially viable solution and started äio in the hope of raising business business money and creating trade partnerships to bring it to the market. They have raised about $ 7 million so far and, since the establishment, have created methods for the development of precision fermentation products, won the 2024 Baltic Sustainability Award and signed over 100 companies worldwide interested in cooperation, the start.
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“We have a very extensive resolution as we do our product and, so far, what we have seen is that our final product is at the same level as vegetable oils, except pesticides – even more clearly,” Bonturi told Techcrunch.
The company then plans to create a facility for the production of fat in commercial quantities by 2027, as well as the license of technology to other cosmetics and food manufacturers. It must also receive licenses for the sale of fats as food, country by country, probably starting with Singapore, which has a history more open to alternative food production products.
“Of course, it’s a new type of food production and we have to go through all licenses and analysis,” Bonturi said.
As these plans go, Bonturi said she hopes to show “two scientists in this little country could really do something better for the world, but that’s just my personal dream”.
If you want to know more about äio from the company itself – while at the same time checking dozens of others, listening to their stadiums and listening to speakers in four different stages – come with us on Disrupt, October 27 to 29, in San Francisco. Learn more here.
