The Bland Company, a UK-based startup, has raised $2.7 million in pre-seed funding to develop plant proteins from agricultural sidestreams, with a focus on creating egg replacements. Their technology can turn underused agricultural byproducts into high-performance plant proteins, starting with the egg industry. The company's ingredients have shown promising results, surpassing the performance of egg whites in terms of solubility, foaming, and emulsification.

Using a feedstock-agnostic process, The Bland Company sources abundant and sustainable plant inputs to create functional proteins that mimic animal proteins. Their AI-driven platform can predict the functional properties of different feedstocks and optimize processing parameters. The company aims to become a biorefinery, producing multiple high-performance functional ingredients from a single plant feedstock, serving both food and non-food applications.