The Dublin-based food data-mining start-up firm, Nuritas, has raised just under €3m from a range of global investors.

These include the Singapore-based New Protein Capital, a specialist food and agri-tech investment firm, and Ali Partovi, a Silicon Valley-based early investor who also backed Dropbox and Facebook.

Nuritas uses big data analytics to extract molecules in food and food by-products, known as peptides, which are then used by the life sciences sector in supplements and new drugs

Nuritas says it can locate these peptides ten times faster than conventional research techniques and for a fraction of the cost.

Earlier this year, Nuritas received the Forbes-sponsored SVG Thrive Accelerator Award.

The company is a spin-out from UCD’s Nova campus-based start-up accelerator programme, and was established by Trinity College Dublin-trained mathematician and bioinformatics specialist Nora Khaldi in 2013.