Turing Labs, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that uses artificial intelligence tools to assist with Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) formulations, announced a $16.5 million Series A raise to continue its mission to become the default AI platform for developing breakthrough CPG in record time. The round was led by New York-based global venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors Moment Ventures and Y Combinator and new investor Borge Hald (CEO and Co-founder of Customer and employee experience public company Medallia). The investment will be used to accelerate R&D, grow the engineering team, widen operations, and a further build a go-to-market organization.

Turing Labs’ SaaS platform uses artificial intelligence tools to assist with product formulations, reformulations and innovation for all CPG formulated goods, including food, cosmetic, personal care, and cleaning products. Design software packages used to design airplanes and computer chips can simulate how a particular part, product, or component will work. Turing Labs has adopted a similar approach for CPGs and suppliers, and its cutting-edge platform can be used to make accurate predictions about new potential formulations before they are made. This reduces the need for costly and time-consuming physical synthesis and testing. Its groundbreaking AI learns from and works closely with product developers, using powerful algorithms built exclusively for CPG manufacturers and suppliers. The platform can then recommend optimal formulations that can decrease the time from concept to production by months or even years from the traditional trial-and-error process.

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“The biggest challenge facing the CPG industry is that products have to be continuously re-formulated and innovated to match ever changing consumer demand. It is an extremely competitive and fast-changing world for both CPG manufacturers and suppliers. To address health and wellness trends, supply chain constraints, and ongoing pressure to improve margins, CPG companies are wasting huge amounts of time, money, and resources on antiquated manual processes. We are the solution to that problem, and Insight Partners’ investment will help us build an even better suite of products for our rapidly growing list of customers.” said Manmit Shrimali, Co-founder & CEO at Turing Labs.

“With rapidly changing consumer preferences, including ingredient inputs, as well as the emergence of competitive independent brands, CPG companies today are under pressure to develop new products faster and evolve their existing portfolio. Turing Labs allows users to automate the formulation process and predict outcomes, helping CPG companies bring innovative products to market faster,” said Josh Fredberg, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “Turing Labs’ ability to systemize and speed up market discovery and product formulation across CPG organizations makes it a stand-out in the industry. We look forward to partnering with the team at Turing Labs as they continue to grow.” Josh will join Turing Labs board.

“We have been investing heavily in building domain-specific algorithms and workflows,” said Ajith Govind, Co-founder and CPO at Turing Labs. “At the moment, a lot of the work of CPG product formulation is done manually by product developers who operate in silos. Sharing data is hard and depending on manual or generic modeling doesn’t scale. Today, we are empowering CPG companies with tools that help them to formulate, reformulate and innovate better but our long-term vision is to create an ecosystem covering all players in the value chain.”

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