Proxy Foods

Proxy Foods (Proxy Foods AI) is a Washington, D.C.-based AI platform for food and beverage product development and formulation, founded in 2022 by Panos Kostopoulos (CEO) and Petros Mandalis after Kostopoulos won the 2022 Bark Tank pitch competition at Georgetown University. The platform integrates human expertise with agentic AI — including Expert-Guided Bayesian Optimization models developed with Stanford University and Food System Innovations — to predict formulation performance and generate recipe iterations before benchtop trials, compressing R&D timelines from months to days. Customers, including Barilla, CAVA, and MISTA (owned by Givaudan), report roughly 80% fewer development iterations and 2-10% COGS reductions on reformulations; a security partnership with Aperio Global adds Zero Trust, quantum-resilient computation on encrypted formulation data. The company maintains offices in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Greece. In August 2026, Proxy Foods AI raised a $6 million seed round led by Ted Leonsis (Monumental Sports & Entertainment), with lead participation from Robert G. Hisaoka and SWaN & Legend Venture Partners.