February 24, 2020

By Lynda Kiernan

New Age Meats, the first company to release a cellular pork sausage, announced it has raised $2.7 million through a Seed round led by New York-based venture firm, ff Venture Capital.  

Other participants in the round, which brings total funding to-date for the startup to $5.7 million, included Agronomics Ltd, Sand Hill Angels, Supernode Ventures, Hemisphere Ventures, and Kairos Ventures, and SOSV, which followed on to their pre-seed investment in the startup. 

Founded by Brian Spears, a chemical engineer, in 2018 in Berkeley, California, and a graduate of the IndieBio accelerator program, New Age Meats is employing automation and data science rooted in stem cell research and bioreactor optimization to develop technology to make meat from animal cells, without the need for slaughter. 

“As a firm we focus on transformative technologies and visionary founders,” said AJ Plotkin, partner, ff Venture Capital. “We’ve found that in Brian and the team at New Age Meats. We are confident cultivated meat will be part of the food economy long-term.”

The year of its founding, New Age Meats conducted the first ever taste test of cellular pork, letting a select group of 40 journalists and prospective investors taste its prototype pork sausage, to positive reviews. 

At the time, the company had gotten its cost of production down to about $5 per sausage link, or $23 per pound. Still expensive, but a world away from the cost of production of the first cellular beef patty in 2013 at $330,000.

New Age recently moved into its new lab facilities in Berkeley, and plans to continue its mission to make better meat that will improve human health, animal welfare, and the environment.

“This funding enables us to grow our team, invest in automation equipment, and iterate our unique cultivators we design in house,” said Spears. “We can’t wait to share tasty, sustainable cultivated meat with avid meat eaters.”

The Next Big Thing

“…the cellular meat industry has tremendous growth potential, and companies like Memphis Meats are poised to become household names, just as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have done during the past 18 months,” said Adam Bergman, managing partner, EcoTech Capital Partners, in his piece, Cellular Meat is Poised to be The Next Big Thing in Alternative Protein, published in GAI News on February 3, 2020. 

Bergman continued, “However, cellular meat companies are still in the early stages of product development with costs that need to decrease significantly. It will take time for cellular meat companies to hone their technology…”

With growing consumer interest, and an expanding field of startups raising larger rounds from increasingly diverse investors, it appears that the development of cellular meat technology is accelerating at pace.

A survey conducted by Surveygoo in 2018 found that 40 percent of U.S. respondents said they were willing to try lab-grown meat, and that same year, a study conducted by Kadence International determined that 66 percent of consumers are open to the idea of trying lab-created protein, reports Food Dive. 

And as consumers become more willing, startups in the field are multiplying. Israel’s Aleph Farms was founded in 2017, and is using a unique 3D, non-GMO tissue engineering technology to regenerate and build muscle tissue; Israel is also home to Future Meat Technologies that is using rapidly growing fibroblasts, or connective tissue cells to culture muscle and healthy fats. 

Amsterdam-based Meatable is also using stem cell technology to develop lab-created pork, and Dutch startup Mosa Meat, the name behind the first cultivated hamburger mentioned earlier, is still working to make cultivated meat scalable and cost effective. Cell cultured meat is also encompassing seafood, with startups such as  San Diego-based BlueNalu and Singapore-based Shiok Meats continuing to raise capital and make news.

– Lynda Kiernan is Editor with GAI Media and daily contributor to the GAI News and Agtech Intel platforms. If you would like to submit a contribution for consideration, please contact Ms. Kiernan at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.com.