Yash Khandelwal
Yash Khandelwal is an Indian entrepreneur, biochemical engineer, and co-founder and CEO of The Bland Company, a London-based food technology startup converting agricultural byproducts into high-performance proteins that replace eggs in industrial food manufacturing. He was educated at The International School Bangalore, giving him roots in India's dynamic science and entrepreneurship culture before moving to the UK to pursue a career at the frontier of food biotechnology.
Khandelwal's earlier ventures demonstrated both his technical creativity and his instinct for ingredient innovation. He founded Funny Nani, a food startup built around a watermelon-seed-based paneer product, developing early insight into how underused agricultural inputs could be transformed into commercially viable food ingredients. He subsequently joined Better Dairy, a UK-based precision fermentation company, where he led work on next-generation ingredients, launched a novel plant-based product, and scaled bioprocesses — building the technical foundation he would later apply to The Bland Company's protein functionalisation platform.
He co-founded The Bland Company in 2024 with Micol Hafez after the two met at the Entrepreneur First accelerator in London, bonding over a shared conviction that the food system's dependence on volatile, animal-derived inputs was both a commercial and sustainability problem that biochemistry could solve. Khandelwal's role as CEO encompasses both the technical direction of the protein chemistry platform and the commercial strategy for selling ingredients into large CPG manufacturers in the US and Europe.
The Bland Company raised £2 million in a pre-seed round in February 2026 led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Entrepreneurs First, Alumni Ventures, Transpose Platform, Behind Genius Ventures, and Vento. Early pilot trials have demonstrated three-to-four-times improvements in protein solubility alongside significant gains in foaming and emulsification performance, validating the platform's path toward cost-competitive egg replacement at industrial scale.
