In 2015, three founders in Santiago set out to answer a question the food industry had never really posed: what if a computer could taste? The trio - Matias Muchnick, a business-minded CEO; Karim Pichara, a computer scientist; and Pablo Zamora, a plant geneticist - built NotCo around a proprietary machine-learning platform they named Giuseppe.
Giuseppe's job is deceptively simple to describe and hard to do. It maps the molecular makeup of an animal product - the fats, proteins and aromatic compounds that make milk taste like milk - and searches thousands of plant ingredients for combinations that hit the same notes. The results are often counterintuitive. NotMilk, the company's best-known product, leans on ingredients such as pea protein, cabbage and pineapple juice, a pairing no human chef would reach for.
That approach turned a Latin American startup into Chile's first unicorn. In July 2021, a $235 million Series D led by Tiger Global valued NotCo at $1.5 billion, with a cap table that reads like a curiosity in itself: Jeff Bezos's Bezos Expeditions, Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton, tennis champion Roger Federer and musician Questlove.
NotCo doesn't sell milk. It sells the idea that a cow is a recipe an algorithm can rewrite.
The company sells consumer brands - NotMilk, NotBurger, NotMayo, NotIceCream - across the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Colombia, reaching more than 6,000 retail points including Whole Foods, Sprouts and Wegmans. But the more telling shift has happened behind the label.
In late 2022 NotCo raised an additional $70 million to open Giuseppe to other companies, turning its internal tool into a B2B platform that CPG brands and ingredient suppliers can license for their own product development. A food company, quietly, started to look more like a software one.
