January 24, 2020

By Lynda Kiernan

Singapore-based TurtleTree Labs announced it has successfully secured pre-seed funding led by Lever VC, and including K2 Global and KBW Ventures.

Co-founded by company CEO Fengru Lin, CSO Rabail Toor, and Chief Strategist Max Rye, TurtleTree Labs is the world’s first startup to apply the latest cutting-edge advancements in biotechnology to create real milk from animal cells. 

Using a unique proprietary technology that uses mammary cells, TurtleTree Labs has achieved a significant breakthrough – the ability to create real whole milk without animals. This development that has the potential to disrupt not only the multi-billion dollar global dairy industry, but the infant formula industry as well, while reducing the global carbon footprint.

“What TurtleTree Labs is doing is fascinating, and their technology could be a serious disruptor in the global dairy industry,” said Nick Cooney, founder and managing partner at Lever VC.

“They are the first company in the world producing real, whole milk from cell cultivation — which opens the door for safer, healthier and customized dairy products that can be produced with far fewer natural resources.”

Noting that now is the time in TurtleTree Lab’s arc to bring in the necessary talent to support the rapid acceleration of the business, Rye states that the funding raised will be used to expand the company’s scientific team and to create additional prototypes, with plans to debut its first cultivated cow’s milk and mother’s milk products this spring.

“We believe the entire landscape of human breast and traditional bovine milk will be transformed as a result of our technology,” said Lin.

“KBW Ventures’ interest in TurtleTree stems both from the team vision and the company’s strategic approach to the future of food using stem cell technology,” said Prince Khaled bin Alwaleed bin Talal AlSaud, founder and CEO of KBW Ventures. Having spent time with the founding team in Singapore, we have a lot of confidence in TurtleTree’s progress as a biotech company and in the direction they are taking from a business perspective.”

In December 2019, Temasek returned to once again lead an attention-grabbing $140 million Series C for food tech startup Perfect Day, a producer of animal-free, lab-created dairy proteins. Horizon Ventures also participated in the round, along with “substantial involvement from past investors”.

Founded in 2014, Perfect Day has a similar mission to TurtleTree Labs: to reimagine the dairy supply chain and to evolve the food system for a more sustainable future by producing animal-free dairy proteins – whey and casein – in a lab that are nutritionally identical to proteins derived from cow’s milk. This is achieved through a simple process – first, “milk’s essential genes” are isolated and then added to a natural dairy flora that uses fermentation to convert plant sugar into milk proteins – a process that the company claims uses 98 percent less water and 65 percent less energy than milk traditionally produced from dairy cows.

The resulting animal-free, soy-free, lactose-free, and vegan whey and casein are then used to make free-versions of cheeses, yogurts, and ice creams that taste and are nutritionally the same as their animal-derived versions. They are expected to be on the market by 2021.

Despite the great inherent potential for companies like TurtleTree Labs and Perfect Day, the pioneers of lab-cultivated milk and dairy products face numerous hurdles, not the least of which is production costs. There are also verbiage issues being raised by the U.S. FDA that defines milk as being produced by an animal. And without any formal framework in place to address lab-created milk, this could pose a challenge to reaching the market.

Other concerns include quota systems – would lab-created dairy products count toward quota limits? And will consumers be on-board with feeding their infant formula created from cells in a laboratory?

In the face of these questions and challenges, Ozi Amanat, founder of K2 Global, said that disruption will stem from technology, saying “The next level of disruption will come from food technology companies solving heath and sustainability at a mass level. TT is solving for an important gap in the food chain at a critical time in history.”

– 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.