When The Spoon first wrote about Nuritas in 2021, the Dublin-born startup had just raised $45 million to scale its peptide discovery platform. At the time, the company was positioned as early entrant of computational biology startups targeting the ingredients supply chain.
Now, almost five years later, and with an additional $42 million Series C under its belt, founder and CEO Dr. Nora Khaldi says the mission hasn’t changed. That consistency stands out in a moment when a good percentage of venture-funded food tech startups now emphasize AI as part of their solutions. That’s because long before generative AI entered the zeitgeist, Khaldi had already made artificial intelligence central to Nuritas’ platform.
That focus on cutting-edge tools started over a decade ago when Khaldi, a mathematician and computer scientist by training, attended a conference in Napa Valley. There, a researcher presented findings on wallaby milk that showed how two wallabies of the same age could look radically different (one large, furry, and muscular; the other small and underdeveloped), with the only difference being the stage-specific milk they had consumed.
Milk intended for younger wallabies supported internal organ development. Milk meant for older wallabies accelerated muscle and fur growth. No environmental variables changed. Only the milk’s molecular composition.
The wallaby example was an epiphany for Khaldi, who reset her thinking as she wondered what if food, like wallaby milk, contained precise molecular instructions capable of shaping biology? What if those instructions could be decoded? She understood that nature contains billions, perhaps trillions, of bioactive molecules. Traditional ingredient discovery methods test them sequentially, a process that can take decades. To meaningfully accelerate discovery, she knew she would need entirely new tools, and it was out of that realization that Nuritas and its AI-powered molecular discovery system were born.
But Khaldi found that being early came with challenges. When Nuritas started, the kind of data required to train an AI platform for molecular discovery didn’t exist off the shelf, which led Khaldi and her team to build proprietary datasets using in-house laboratories to generate consistent biological and chemical data. The company trained its AI not only on efficacy, but also on real-world constraints such as heat stability, solubility, digestibility, and scalability, because in food, a molecule only matters if it can survive formulation and manufacturing.
Since those early days, Nuritas has launched PeptiYouth, an ingredient designed to improve cellular regeneration and slow visible signs of aging. It introduced PeptiStrong, discovered in fava beans, to support muscle synthesis and reduce muscle loss, and PeptiSleep, a plant-based peptide aimed at stress and sleep support.
According to Khaldi, Nuritas has achieved something many AI-driven life sciences startups are still chasing. “We’ve been the first to take it through a clinical success, through regulatory success, onto the market multiple times,” she said.
You can watch my full conversation with Dr. Khaldi below and listen to it on The Spoon Podcast.
