India’s Inaara NeoFoods Gets $2.2M to Build Closed-Loop Plant-Based Nutrition Platform
Indian food tech startup Inaara NeoFoods has raised ₹21 crore ($2.2M) to advance its AI-powered “farm to formulation” platform for producing plant-based proteins, fibres, fats, and functional starches.
Seeking to leverage India’s crop ecosystem to create the next generation of plant-based nutrition solutions, Mumbai-based Inaara NeoFoods has closed a seed funding round to advance its efforts.
The firm has brought in ₹21 crore ($2.2M) from a group of investors, entrepreneurs and consultants including Ashish Gupta, Pavan Vaish, Mohit Bhandari, Ramesh Mangaleswaran, Sudhir Kamath, Deepali Khandelwal, Kavita Laddha, Manas Rawat, and Ankit Gupta.
Inaara NeoFoods will use the capital to speed up the development of its artificial-intelligence-led (AI) closed-loop platform to design functional plant-based ingredients.
“Our ambition is to build a globally relevant farm-to-formulation nutrient ecosystem from India, bringing together agriculture, food science and computational intelligence to enhance nutrition in everyday foods,” co-founder and co-CEO Pankaj Khandelwal said in a LinkedIn post announcing the fundraise.
Plant proteins the core focus for Inaara NeoFoods
Inaara NeoFoods was only established earlier this year by Khandelwal, his wife and co-CEO Purnima, COO Ashwin Raghuwanshi, and chief business officer Ved Agarwal.
It’s tapping into India’s rich agricultural strength, scientific know-how. computational nutrition capabilities, international partnerships and controlled value chain to deliver consistent, traceable, and certified plant-based solutions for CPG food and beverage applications.
“India has the crops, the talent and the scale. The opportunity is to add science, technology and innovation to create the next generation of plant-based nutrition solutions,” Purnima said in a LinkedIn post.
The company is building a fully integrated platform that controls every link in the value chain, with the closed-loop system ensuring continuous “customer-centric product development, complete traceability and quality control”.
Its platform entails contract farming and aggregation to ensure raw material stability and traceability, and proprietary varieties; application-led R&D to solve the “taste-functionality tradeoff”; product enhancement via co-development partnerships; and state-of-the-art precision processing technology for superior yields and specification-driven outputs.
Inaara NeoFoods’s processing infrastructure delivers plant proteins as the core output, including chickpea, pulse, and soy isolates and concentrates for global food and drink applications.
But it’s also working on other ingredient streams, such as soluble and insoluble fibres for gut-health-positioned products, high-value lipid fractions for nutraceuticals and specialty food ingredients, and functional starches to deliver texture, viscosity, and clean-label solutions for manufacturers.
“Everyday foods are the biggest nutrition delivery system in the world. The opportunity is to build better nutrition into them without asking anyone to change what they eat,” Raghuwanshi noted in a LinkedIn post. “That is what we’re building at Inaara, through plant-based nutrition solutions.”
Indian consumers and investors fork up for plant proteins
The funding will unlock investments in application-specific formulation development, building a proprietary AI and computational nutrition engine, crop characterisation, and optimising agricultural inputs via upstream integration to secure biopredictability.
“Every FMCG leader in the F&B space today faces the same friction: how do you reformulate everyday food products for cleaner, higher nutrition without altering the sensory signature that consumers love or risking cost spikes?” Agarwal said in a LinkedIn post.
“In our understanding, that potential exists, but the bridge to commercial scale has been missing. From crop sourcing that is consistent, to nutrient extraction that is precise and formulations that are application-first and consumer-sensorial-driven. That is the bridge we are building – by bringing in agronomy, food science, computational nutrition, proprietary AI, global know-how and tech.”
Inaara NewFoods is the latest in a swathe of next-gen, functional food startups that have secured sizeable investments in India, where proteinmaxxing and functional nutrition are consumer health priorities now. Polling shows that 37% of Indians want to add more plant proteins to their diets, and more of them want to increase their intake of protein from plant-based sources than from animal products.
India also ranks third among countries with the highest share of functional food purchases, with nearly 90% of its citizens doing so. A PwC survey in 2025 found that 38% of them consider high nutritional value one of the top three factors influencing their food purchases.
This shift is being driven by Gen Z, which accounts for 27% of the population and controls 35% of consumption spending. And in a 2026 Ipsos survey, 82% of this cohort said it’s important to consume protein, and 91% are open to adopting plant-based foods (mainly to increase protein intake).
Last month, Arboreal Bioinnovations raised $24M to scale up its suite of functional ingredients, which include yeast and plant proteins, sugar replacers, and fibres. And in February, Good Monk closed a ₹33 crore round ($3.6M) to scale its dietary supplements and plant-based proteins.
Meanwhile, Shark Tank alum Earthful landed $2.9M last year to support the expansion of its women’s health products (which include plant protein powders), and Cosmix Wellness, another Shark Tank success, agreed to sell a 60% stake to CPG giant Marico in a deal worth $25M.