Josh Decolongon (left), Alec Lee (middle) and Mardonn Chua (right) are the original founders of … [+]
Kris Turner Photography
Endless West entered the reverse-engineered food and beverage scene in 2018 with Glyph, a “molecular whisky” made to taste like aged whisky while boosting sustainability without years in a barrel. The foodtech startup achieved this feat by breaking down a beverage to its molecular level and replicating what they found without the time or resources required to make the original, often more expensive product. Now, Endless West is looking to work with spirits brands of all sizes, to help them cut back on production costs while boosting sustainability. With $60 million in new series C funding announced Wednesday, it’s expanding production capabilities by 10x to 20x to do that.
“The original inspiration was very much being able to archive and share famous vintages of wine and spirits,” cofounder Alec Lee tells Forbes. He and future cofounder Mardonn Chua had the skills to make this happen. Both worked at stem cell startup Extem and spent their nights and weekends working on developing the biological blueprints which would allow them to recreate copies of existing products, but also make their own from scratch. Glyph, the first commercial product to emerge from their efforts, went on to win numerous awards. But these days, Endless West is more focused on building out its ability to use this tech to work with other brands and spirit makers through its research and manufacturing outfit, Blank Collective.
“We built a core tech that isn’t fundamentally about wine or whiskey — or any fundamental product itself,” Lee says. Blank Collective looks to help upstart spirit companies, retailers and global manufacturers find ways to spend less money, create more sustainable products or digitally document their offerings. “Our hope and our belief is that ultimately what matters isn’t how much we control the brands themselves but how many they will utilize this approach and reap the advantages from the accessibility, quality and sustainability.”
The $60 million series C round brings the startup’s total funding to $95 million. This latest round is a return engagement for James Stewart, partner at Level One Fund which co-led the round with funds managed by UBS O’Connor. While Level One is sector agnostic, Stewart tells Forbes that he was personally interested in the foodtech space and reached out to Endless West before its Series B round after discovering the company online and finding its goal really compelling. He wrote a small check at the time, but doubled down for the Series C round because he felt the company had de-risked itself against its fellow foodtech competition. “What makes us excited about the company is that they have this unique technology and production process,” Stewart says. “In foodtech, there are so many players focused on the same playbook, what Endless has created is a new process.”
The way it works is that once a product has been broken down to its molecules, a brand or company can evaluate the ingredients and look at ways to change them based on other materials found in nature with similar molecular makeup. Lee says the makeup of wine is a great example. “A grape grows slowly and requires a huge amount of water and care — and frankly pesticides — often in drought prone regions,” he says. “Those molecules you ultimately get that turn into the sugars and the flavor molecules are found in other plants that grow faster and grow more sustainably.” Another aspect is aging. Instead of aging a whiskey, which requires large amounts of water and produces less liquid than it starts with, Endless West can infuse the wood molecules directly into the spirit for a faster and more sustainable way to achieve the same result.
Lee says they were originally worried about how the market would react to their tech and initially heard feedback from a sushi chef in San Francisco that the tech would contribute to consolidation of distributors in the market and could enable brands to copy each other’s recipes. Lee agrees that if used irresponsibly, that could easily be the outcome. But Lee compares the process more to the digital documentation of music. It’s meant to create a record of it so that it can be recreated without its original form or in a more sustainable or cost-effective way than the original. “Digitization initially seems scary but it’s a path for immortalizing these great works of art and that I think to the industry is much more comforting,” Lee says.
