The Bland Company Raises £2M Pre-Seed to Turn Agricultural Byproducts Into Egg-Replacing Proteins

February 17, 2026

London-based food technology startup The Bland Company has secured £2 million in a pre-seed round led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Entrepreneurs First, Transpose Platform, Behind Genius Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and Vento. The capital will be used to grow the team and accelerate development of the company's protein functionalisation platform, which converts neglected agricultural byproducts into high-performance food ingredients targeting the egg replacement market.

Egg ingredients are deeply embedded in modern food manufacturing — roughly one third of global egg production flows into industrial applications such as baked goods, sauces, confectionery, and prepared foods. Despite their ubiquity, eggs present a persistent procurement challenge. Prices have swung two to three times over the past 18 months, driven by avian flu outbreaks, cage-free regulation rollouts, climate-related feed cost pressures, and seasonal demand shifts. Existing plant-based alternatives have struggled to replicate the multi-functional performance of eggs — precision fermentation approaches carry high capital costs, Rubisco-based solutions require expensive downstream processing, and mung-bean proteins perform inconsistently across applications.

The Bland Company addresses this gap through a proprietary biochemical process that converts agricultural side streams — including byproducts from rice and pasta production — into proteins with enhanced solubility, foaming, binding, and emulsification properties. The platform is feedstock agnostic, meaning it can adapt to different abundant plant inputs without requiring novel manufacturing equipment, plugging directly into existing food production infrastructure. The company is currently running pilot trials with large consumer packaged goods companies in the US and Europe and has demonstrated three-to-four-times improvements in solubility, alongside significant gains in foaming and emulsification performance.

The company was founded in 2024 by Yash Khandelwal, who previously built next-generation ingredients and scaled bioprocesses at Better Dairy, and Micol Hafez, a biochemist and bioengineering graduate who built a personalised nutrition platform. The team is focused on beachhead applications in baked goods, condiments, and confectionery, where egg performance and cost predictability are critical to large-scale production. New funding will go towards hiring scientists and engineers to advance protein chemistry and application science capabilities.

Initialized Capital led the round, with partner Zoe Perret framing the opportunity as a clear infrastructure play — noting the platform already surpasses egg-white performance benchmarks while hitting the cost economics that food manufacturers require. The round also draws in Entrepreneurs First, which backed the founding team at the earliest stage, alongside specialist investors Transpose Platform, Behind Genius Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and Vento. The longer-term vision is to build a technology platform that creates a new class of functional proteins from overlooked plant side streams, reducing the food system's dependence on volatile commodity inputs.

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