Tech roundup: Making dairy products without cows

Welcome to our Tech Roundup, where we bring you the biggest stories in technology and innovation in Brazil and Latin America. This week: A Brazilian startup that uses precision fermentation to replicate proteins produced by cows.

Making milk without cows

Mimicking cow’s milk to produce traditional dairy products on a large scale: this is the main goal of Future Cow, a startup founded in the first quarter of this year, which presents itself as the first Brazilian dairy precision fermentation company.

State of play.  Future Cow recently announced a pre-seed funding round from Big Idea Ventures, a Singapore-based accelerator and venture capital firm with around USD 100 million in assets that has invested in more than a hundred food tech startups. Co-founder and CEO Leonardo Vieira says Future Cow is the first startup working to scale precision fermentation techniques in Latin America. 

• There are other companies with similar proposals operating in other countries, such as the U.S.-based Perfect Day. “The fact that we arrived later allowed us to study these companies and see what types of obstacles they had, so we could prepare for them and think about a different technology and business model,” Mr. Vieira tells The Brazilian Report.

Why it matters. In addition to the infinitely smaller environmental impact, Mr. Vieira says his non-animal milk is molecularly identical to milk from cows, but without undesirable elements such as...