Five Cultured Meat Startups Raise Funding as Fledgling Industry Comes into Focus

As well that month, Tyson Food Ventures joined Memphis Meats ’s $17 million Series A round, originally unveiled last August. In March, Wild Earth , a Berkeley, California-based startup focusing on pet food pulled in a $4 million seed round.

Just a few weeks later, The Wild Type , a San Francisco-based startup pulled in a $3.5 million seed round to focus on culturing salmon. Perfect Day Foods , a California startup using cellular agriculture to produce dairy products secured a $24.7 million Series A round earlier this month. And though its not quite financing news, it is also notable that, JUST (formerly Hampton Creek), which has forecasted that it would have a cultured meat product on shelves this year, lost its director of cellular agriculture and another leading researcher in January, who then incorporated a firm called Mission Barns, going to Gizmodo .

In general, each cultured meat startup has its own unique approach to the finished product — some are working on fish, others meat, some premium products, some seek to compete on the lower-end of the quality spectrum. Kolbeck and Arye Elfenbein, a medical doctor earlier on working in tissue culture founded The Wild Type in 2016 when the field was much less crowded. In Seattle and San Francisco, kolbeck and Elfenbein chose to culture salmon because of the size of the market in the US as well as their location. “Our roots are really here in the pacific northwest.

The chef on our team is in Portland — it’s all salmon country,” told reporters Kolbeck. The number of startups seemingly working toward the same goal — creating a replica of a chosen animal product. Scaling production to compete with the real thing — begs the question: is each one reinventing the wheel?

Does this industry need fewer consumer-facing startups and more focused on enabling technologies? “Because this industry is essentially months old, I think a lot of the framing is around the concept and the species as that’s what the fundraising environment is responding to well. A 2017 report from the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit that works with scientists, backers. Entrepreneurs to support innovations in plant-based foods and cultured meat, breaks the process of cellular agriculture down into six elements: cell lines, cell culture media, scaffolding and structuring, bioreactors, and supply chain and distribution.

All of these processes and technologies could be theoretically provided by different firms serving food. Non-food shoppers. “Critical technologies that are developed along the way will likely serve as lucrative intellectual property licensing opportunities for other high-value industries that rely on large-scale cell culture,” reads the report. Datar explained that as the startups in the space now develop their own technologies, intellectual property (IP) will result, giving them particular expertise in one part of the process or another, and thus a supply chain may emerge. “It would not surprise me if these businesses go on to differentiate based on the technologies that they build in their first IP steps.

The IP is going to become more of a guiding factor in terms of where these firms will be focusing with time,” posited Datar. “I think once somebody has cracked the code from a technology perspective, we’ll have companies tackling a particular part of the supply chain,” explained Kolbeck. Going to Datar, startups looking to solve specific links in the supply chain are starting to pop up and if they raise backing, that will be a signal that the IP in the space is maturing – a sign of progress toward a salable finished product. The GFI report in addition indicates that the evolution of a cultured meat product may not be as straightforward as these consumer-facing businesses suggest. “The first products that come to market may be hybrid products wherein clean meat [cultured meat] is included as a part of plant-based products,” according to the report.

Per to The next product,, the report, will likely be ground meat products since the cellular structure of these is less complex, followed by more structured items like fish fillets and chicken breasts. More cultured meat financing announcements are likely on the way in 2018.

Kolbeck mentioned that in his experience, backers are quickly gaining a more nuanced understanding of cellular agriculture, which they’ll need if business-to-business cellular agriculture startups are going to raise as much as their consumer-facing sisters.