Slashing Oil Development from 2 Years to 30 Days to Accelerate Innovation and Cut Time-to-Market
French biotech company SMEY, which uses fermentation and artificial intelligence to create sustainable cultivated oils, announces the launch of NOY — the Neobank of Yeasts: the world’s first digital databank of yeast fatty acid profiles. Designed to accelerate the development of next-generation oils for consumer goods, NOY replaces years of genetic engineering with a precision-matching process: instead of modifying yeast to produce a specific oil, a process that can take up to 2 years, NOY searches its proprietary strain database to find yeast that already naturally produces the desired oil. This cuts R&D timelines to just 30 days, allowing manufacturers to rapidly develop high-performance, fully traceable ingredient alternatives tailored to their exact specifications.
NOY was developed after more than two years of focused R&D by a team of 30+ experts in microbial fermentation, lipid chemistry, bioinformatics, and computational biology — drawing on talent from leading institutions across Europe and the US. At its foundation is a curated physical library of over 1,000 yeast strains, seamlessly integrated with SMEY.AI, a proprietary system that maps genomic, metabolic, and fermentation data. This engine identifies the optimal strains for specific product attributes — such as melting point, texture, or oxidative stability — in just hours, accelerating processes that once took weeks.
“With NOY, we’re not trying to hack biology — we’re trying to understand it. This project is our way of engaging in a dialogue with nature. Many of the solutions already exist — hidden in natural yeast strains like perfect compositions of oils and fats. Our role is to discover them, digitize them, and make them accessible through a system that merges biology with computation.”, said Viktor Sartakov-Korzhov, founder of SMEY.
Shortages of key ingredients like cocoa butter, deforestation caused by palm oil, and CO2 emissions driven by petroleum-derived lubricants are affecting product development timelines and increasing costs across sectors. Using NOY, SMEY has already produced a cultivated cocoa butter with 35% stearic acid, matching the performance of traditional cocoa butter in food applications, as well as a semi-solid cultivated high-oleic oil for cosmetic use with a smooth, non-greasy texture that offers high stability and skin efficacy. SMEY’s cultivated oils are produced locally in Europe, ensuring traceability and minimizing supply chain risk.
About SMEY:
SMEY is an AI-enabled techbio company developing sustainable cultivated oils and fats through precision fermentation. Headquartered in Paris, France and with an R&D center in Munich, Germany, SMEY leverages its proprietary Neobank of Yeasts — a physical and digital library of over 1,000 strains — and its SMEY-AI platform to produce high-performance, customizable oils for food, cosmetics, and industrial applications. SMEY’s flagship ingredients — cHOB (Cultivated High Oleic Oil) and cCB (Cultivated Cocoa Butter) — offer stable, traceable, and non-tropical alternatives to conventional commodity oils. cHOO introduces a new category of cultivated oils offering a unique fatty acid profile with superior stability, skin feel, and sustainability. With its designed composition, it offers superior performance and sets a new standard for innovation in the industry. In contrast, cCB offers a direct replacement for cocoa butter, matching its functional properties while avoiding the environmental and ethical trade-offs of tropical sourcing. Produced without farmland, using minimal water, and with zero deforestation impact, SMEY’s cultivated oils enable global brands to meet clean-label and EUDR requirements while building traceable, climate-resilient supply chains.
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