The partnership will utilize Brightseed’s proprietary AI platform Forager to “accelerate discoveries and innovation” for Haleon, the company behind the best-selling Centrum and Emergen-C brand of dietary supplements.
Although the details of the collaboration have not been shared with the public, Brightseed will make Forager directly accessible to Haleon’s team, AgFunder News reported.
“Forager AI not only accelerates innovation, it also expands possibilities in ways that would have been otherwise intractable,” said Lee Chae, co-founder and CEO at Brightseed, in a statement.
Brightseed uses AI to discover insights into plant bioactives—compounds in plants and other natural sources that have potential uses in metabolic health, gut health, immunity, among other applications. Forager systematically identifies natural bioactives and maps their connection to human health benefits.
“This collaboration is pivotal in accelerating discoveries and innovations that are firmly rooted in superior, trusted science and the highest standards of scientific integrity,” said Sandrine Alvarado, vice president and head of future horizons R&D at Haleon.
By last year, Forager had mapped more than seven million compounds from plants, fungi and bacterial strains across 23 human health areas.
Additional partnerships
Brightseed has other collaborations beyond Haleon, including two launched last year. In September, the company partnered with Belgian hydroponic biomimetic indoor farming innovators Botalys to sustainably source bioactive botanicals.
Botalys works with global players such as L’Oreal R&I and operates a 40,000-foot vertical farming facility growing medicinal plants hydroponically. Botalys is leveraging Brightseed’s Forager technology to measure, fine tune and optimize the bioactive expression of its plant supply.
In July, cranberry giant Ocean Spray began its collaboration with Brightseed, using Forager to identify several bioactives that had yet to be extensively studied in cranberries but that could have significant human health potential. Forager has predicted that compounds in cranberries are associated with antiviral, anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial functions.
Financing
In 2022 Brightseed accomplished several firsts. That year it received $68 million in Series B funding, a round led by global investment company Temasek. The funds were used to advance natural compound discovery and clinical validation.
“Consumers are increasingly looking for natural and accessible solutions to restore their health, but industry has been severely limited by a lack of tools and technologies to look more deeply into nature’s potential to do that,” Sofia Elizondo, co-founder and CCO at Brightseed, told NutraIngredients.
The financing also supported the development of the company’s first ingredient from a new ingredient commercialization center in Raliegh, North Carolina.
The company also launched that first ingredient, Brightseed Bio 01, as a product within the company’s portfolio of bioactives discovered by Forager. The AI platform identified two naturally occurring plant compounds as beneficial to maintaining gut barrier integrity.
Alina Slotnik, the company’s vice president of bioactives, said at the time that “Brightseed Bio 01 not only demonstrates how Forager is rapidly translating insights into tangible products for the marketplace but offers a true evolution in the field of nutrition science to benefit consumer health.”
