He named his AI after a Renaissance painter who made portraits out of vegetables. Then he used it to make milk out of cabbage. Kraft Heinz signed the contract.
Matias Muchnick runs a company whose primary product, technically, is a database of ways to make things taste like other things. NotCo sells plant-based milk, mayonnaise and burgers under the Not-something naming convention (NotMilk, NotMayo, NotBurger, and so on, a branding logic that scales in an obvious and slightly cheeky way). Underneath the cartons is Giuseppe, an internal AI that maps aroma and texture across roughly four hundred thousand plant species and proposes recipes.
Giuseppe is named after Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the sixteenth-century Milanese painter who made portraits by assembling fruit and vegetables into human faces. This is a very on-the-nose reference, in the sense that a company whose entire premise is that food is composable is naming its AI after the guy who literally composed food into people. It also tells you something about Muchnick, which is that he prefers references that reward the reader for catching them.
The company he runs, TheNotCompany Inc., was founded in 2015 - one day, various profiles report, before OpenAI was founded, which is the kind of trivia that ages well. NotCo is now valued at roughly $1.5 billion, has raised more than $455 million total, and in 2022 formed a joint venture with Kraft Heinz called The Kraft Heinz Not Company. Bezos Expeditions is on the cap table. There are 820 employees. Muchnick, the CEO, is thirty-something, Chilean, and does not want anyone to call his company a unicorn, which, of course, is exactly what people call it.
"I also don't recommend anyone, any founder, to be thinking about whether they are going to be a unicorn or not," Muchnick told Bloomberg Línea in 2022. "If you're not a unicorn you might as well be successful. Let's pour cold water on this unicorn, centaur boom." This is the kind of thing that reads as false modesty until you notice he keeps saying it in interviews, and then it starts to look like an actual worldview. The worldview appears to be: valuations are a story you tell investors, and the story you tell customers should be about whether the milk tastes like milk.
The milk, made largely of pineapple and cabbage in its original formulation, does in fact taste like milk. This has been NotCo's central claim since inception and its main commercial argument. Muchnick's version of the pitch is that there are hundreds of thousands of plant species humans have never eaten in a systematic way, and that with enough compute you can search that space for compounds that behave, in the mouth and in the pan, like beef fat or casein. Giuseppe does the searching.
"We all want to change the world, but not all of us want to help our mom do the dishes."
Giuseppe is NotCo's proprietary system for suggesting plant-based ingredient combinations that mimic animal-derived foods at a molecular level. Its four modules do different pieces of the search.
Figures approximated from public reporting via Forbes, Food Dive, TechCrunch, Crunchbase.
"The idea of finding answers among the more than 400,000 unexplored plant species in the world has always been exciting."
"Chile has everything it needs: talent, greater experience and now a venture capital ecosystem that allows us to position ourselves as one of the most important countries in the region for entrepreneurship."
"If you're not a unicorn you might as well be successful. Let's pour cold water on this unicorn, centaur boom."
"We all want to change the world, but not all of us want to help our mom do the dishes."
Before NotCo, Muchnick sold eggless mayonnaise. Before that, a gamified wellness app called Chooz. The through line is that he keeps trying to get people to eat differently, and each attempt gets more technical. NotCo is what happens when a person who wanted to sell mayonnaise learns machine learning.
Karim Pichara is a computer scientist. Pablo Zamora is a plant geneticist. Muchnick, the finance kid, is the sales layer. The joke here writes itself: it takes three people from three disciplines to convince someone that oat milk isn't the ceiling.
NotCo started as a consumer brand and increasingly sells the AI to other food companies. Giuseppe is now a licensed product. This is a normal software company move that is unusual in a category that mostly sells cartons.
NotCo's incorporation date sits one day earlier than OpenAI's, per profiles of Muchnick. Two AI companies, same week, very different diets.
Arcimboldo painted Vertumnus, a portrait of Emperor Rudolf II made entirely of fruit. Giuseppe the AI, named after him, effectively paints milk out of pineapple.
His Twitter and Facebook both use notcous. His LinkedIn is mmuchnick. His email is at thenotcompany.com. Very consistent branding.
Chilean co-founder and CEO of NotCo, a food-technology company that uses AI to design plant-based versions of dairy and meat products.
NotCo's proprietary AI platform. It suggests plant-based ingredient combinations that mimic the taste, texture and aroma of animal-based foods. Named after painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo.
Yes. Bezos Expeditions has participated in multiple NotCo rounds since 2019.
Founded The Eggless Co., a plant-based mayonnaise startup in 2012, and Chooz, a wellness app.
Muchnick has publicly discussed a path to profitability and NotCo has expanded into B2B AI licensing. It has not publicly confirmed profitability of its consumer brand.