Kinish, a Tokyo food technology start-up that makes dairy alternatives from rice, has raised JPY 490 million (US$3.1 million) in the first close of a Series A round, to sell more of its rice-based ice cream and to scale up a process that grows casein, the main protein in cow's milk, inside rice grains, reports Anay Mridul for Green Queen.
The investors are the Inspire Mutualistic Symbiosis Fund 1, the Shimadzu Future Innovation Fund, Obayashi Corporation and Love Veggies Holding. The round follows a JPY 120 million (US$800,000) seed round in 2025.
The technology is molecular farming: plants are genetically engineered to produce a protein, so that the plant itself acts as the bioreactor instead of a fermentation tank. Kinish uses dwarf rice plants only 20 centimetres tall, grown stacked in plant factories, which it says can be harvested in less than half the time of field rice. It has expressed casein, the protein that lets cheese melt and stretch, in rice.
In a demonstration at its plant factory, the company says, the process yielded 2,080 grams of brown rice per square metre in three months, against an average of 539 grams per square metre from one crop a year in open fields in Japan. Kinish now plans to breed for higher casein content and run larger cultivation trials towards mass production, with the aim of making ice cream, cheese and yoghurt with its cow-free milk protein.
Meanwhile it sells ice cream under The Rice Creamery brand, made from rice syrup and cashew butter, in about 500 stores in Japan and in Washington, DC. "With this funding, we're moving from proving what's possible to scaling what works," said founder and CEO Hashizume Hiroya.
Green Queen notes the context: Japan's number of dairy farmers is declining, rice consumption has more than halved since the 1960s, and a crop shortage forced the government to release 200,000 tonnes of emergency rice stocks. Tamaki Horii of Obayashi called multi-season cropping of dwarf rice and high-value protein production "promising initiatives towards building a sustainable food system".
Source: Green Queen
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