Californian food tech startup One Bio has closed a $27M Series A round to advance its short-chain fibres derived from agricultural waste.
Fibre isn’t fibre – it’s fibres.
That’s the fundamental finding of One Bio, a Sacramento-based startup that is extracting invisible and tasteless fibres from plants before they end up being wasted. These WholeFibers can be used in a range of product applications, including plant-based milks, cereals, supplements, as well as GLP-1-friendly foods.
The startup is aiming to tackle America’s fibre deficiency, its associated public health detriments, and waste from the food and agriculture industry by leveraging the active fibres in thousands of plants. Doing so will also contribute to consumers’ deeper focus on the gut microbiome and manufacturers’ pivot to foods that can complement GLP-1 agonist drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro.
To advance this mission, One Bio has secured $27M in a Series A funding round, taking its total raised to $44M. The latest investment was led by AlphaEdison and joined by new backers including Leaps by Bayer, Mitsui E12, Morado Ventures, ReMY, DSM-Ferminich, and Better, as well as existing investors such as iSelect, Skyview Life Sciences, Collaborative Fund, and Acre Venture Partners.
“Faced with endless shelves of processed and packaged foods, and surrounded by chronic diseases, consumers are rapidly awakening to the power of the gut microbiome. An avalanche of signals points to a large pool of latent demand. This is One Bio’s market,” said Nate Redmond, managing partner of AlphaEdison.
One Bio takes on industrial food
Formerly called BCD Bioscience, One Bio was founded in 2019 by Matt Amicucci, Carlito Lebrilla, Bruce German, and David Mills, with Matt Barnard coming on as a co-founder and CEO last year.
To work out the fibre problem, the team first characterised the structures of thousands of active fibres from plants, cataloguing them into a database called Glycopedia. It contains information about nearly 3,000 plant-derived carbohydrate structures, and allows One Bio to analyse their individual functions and how they promote wellbeing.
“The word ‘fibre’ predates the discoveries of our founding scientists, and implies that there is one fibre instead of thousands of diverse structures with diverse functions. Calling fibres ‘fibre’ is like calling Vitamins A, B12, K3, iron, and calcium all ‘nutrient’ without recognition that they are diverse in structures and functions,” Barnard is quoted as saying on the company’s website.
The problem with fibre is that adding it in high quantities to food makes it taste unpleasant. One Bio breaks active fibres from food byproducts like apple peels, cranberry skins, and soy or almond pulp, into short-chain fibres that are tasteless and textureless. These seamlessly blend into foods and beverages as an ‘undetectable’ but highly effective ingredient.
Over time, the human gut microbiota co-evolved to unlock and consume sugars bound within the fibres present in plants, producing the molecules we need for core functioning, such as blood glucose management, mood and energy regulation, and satiety. But, One Bio argues, the modern diet is composed of processed foods that have isolated the sugars and discarded the fibres.
WholeFibers allow you to consume five to 10 times more fibre every day, which is helpful, considering that people today ingest 90% less fibre than we did before the industrialisation of food, according to Barnard.
“Modern food processing techniques strip plant fibres from our foods and starve the microbiome of the nutrients it needs to make us healthy,” he said after the Series A funding. “We have the opportunity to offer industry and people an exponentially better set of choices than those on shelves today.”
A GLP-1 opportunity
One Bio is working within a huge market – 95% of Americans don’t consume enough fibre, the lack of which starves the microbiome and denies our bodies of core functions for longer health spans. In fact, US consumers only eat half the recommended amount on average, despite the link between fibre-rich diets and lower risks of obesity, type 2 diabetes, strokes, high cholesterol, and cardiovascular diseases (the leading cause of death in the country).
But it seems like there’s a shift in consumer attitudes towards fibre. After protein, fibre is the nutrient Americans were most interested in consuming this year, according to a 3,000-person survey. And over nine in 10 were getting it from food products (instead of beverages or supplements).
The rise in popularity has been bolstered by documentaries like Netflix’s Hack Your Health, personalised nutrition apps such as Zoe, and the mainstreaming of GLP-1 agonist drugs – which have been used by 30 million Americans. The latter medications replicate incretin, a natural hormone found in our bodies that boosts the GLP-1 hormone to regulate blood sugar, fulfil the appetite, and manage weight.
Incretin is naturally regulated in our bodies by fibre, and with 62% of Americans more receptive to dietary change than injectable weight-loss drugs, the food industry has been scrambling to cater to the demand for high-fibre and GLP-1-supportive offerings. Nestlé, Conagra, Kroger and Daily Harvest are all getting in on the act, while fibre-focused startups like Supergut, Olipop and Uplift Food stand to benefit too.
One Bio says its short-chain fibres can provide “an offramp” to reduce people’s reliance on GLP-1 drugs, which have an array of side effects, and treat metabolic diseases.
“One Bio puts thriving microbiomes to work delivering longevity, aiding digestion and providing the fuel we need to maximise health,” said Barnard. “We aim to avoid and reverse the negative impact of today’s processed food diet which accounts for 70% of calories consumed.”
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