April 22, 2024

By Lynda Kiernan-Stone, Global AgInvesting Media

Listed cellular agriculture leader Agronomics announced that its portfolio company Mosa Meat has raised $40 million in new funding to scale production of its cultivated beef in preparation for market entry. 

This oversubscribed round was co-led by Lowercarbon Capital and M Ventures, a part of Merck Group. Joining the round were new investors including Dutch state-owned impact investor Invest-NL, the European Commission strategic development program InvestEU, Limburg Institute for Development and Financing (LIOF) and the Limburg Energy Fund (LEF), PHW Group, and XO Ventures, one of Europe’s largest poultry producers. 

Mosa Meat is a pioneer of cultured beef. The startup developed a technology for producing lab-grown beef from animal cells, leading to the company’s unveiling of the world’s first lab-produced hamburger in 2013. These same pioneers went on to found Mosa Meat three years later to scale up production for commercial consumption. 

This first pilot lab-created hamburger cost approximately $280,000 at the time due mostly to a lack of scale and the high price of inputs needed for production, including costly fetal bovine serum. However, as technology advances, scaling becomes more easily attainable, and Mosa Meat has replaced fetal bovine serum with an unidentified non-animal replacement.

Today, from its headquarters in Maastricht, the Netherlands, Mosa Meat is a privately held company with a mission to fundamentally reshape the global food system by making beef in a way that is better for people, animals, and the planet. 

The company is one of 20 in the portfolio managed by Agronomics, a leading alternative proteins company with a focus on cellular agriculture including precision fermentation and cultivated meat.

With an eye toward decoupling supply chains from the environment and animals, Agronomics seeks minority stakes in companies owning technologies with defensible IP that offer new ways to produce food and materials that also disrupt agriculture to improve sustainability, human health, animal welfare, and the environment. 

“Mosa Meat has been at the forefront of cultivated beef for over a decade. With a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions in the food industry resulting from beef production alone, a long-term solution for beef production is essential,” said Jim Mellon, co-founder and executive director, Agronomics.

“Today’s announcement reinforces our confidence in Mosa Meat’s technical and commercial expertise, and we look forward to their receiving regulatory approval later this year.”

As the company shifts beyond the challenges of the lab toward getting products onto retail shelves, Mosa Meat opened its fourth facility, making it the largest cultured meat player and increasing its production capacity as it prepares for its first formal tastings of cultivated beef in the Netherlands later this year. 

“The overall macroeconomic landscape has been rough in the last two years, which has culled the herd of companies and forced us to be even more strategic and focused on achieving our mission,” said Maarten Bosch, CEO, Mosa Meat.

“As such, we are humbled and honored to welcome both public parties and conventional meat producers to join this critical journey. In an environment that is increasingly polarized, we choose to connect and collaborate, working towards a future where cultivated beef is a real choice for consumers and a complementary solution in the toolbox to combat the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity.”

Bosch continued, “Rethinking how we produce great food for a growing planet without destroying it is quite a daunting task and will take many people and organizations to pull in the same direction.”

~ Lynda Kiernan-Stone is editor in chief with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and Agtech Intel News. She can be reached at lkiernan-stone@globalaginvesting.com.

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