January 14, 2021

photo credit: Square Peg Capital

By Lynda Kiernan, Global AgInvesting Media

If you could try alpaca, or water buffalo without the guilt of slaughtering wild animals, or any of the ethical questions that would normally come to mind, would you?

Only four animals account for nearly all the meat humans eat (representing only 0.02 percent of the options available) because for millennia survival bound us to focus on only the animals that could be most successfully domesticated.

Australia’s Vow Food is tackling the challenges of hunger, food security, human health, and environmental degradation through ethically expanding the diversity of our options by using animal cells to grow meat in a laboratory.

However, Vow is not only looking to produce mainstream meats such as chicken or pork, but has a cell library of 11 species including water buffalo, kangaroo, and alpaca, which it plans to produce through a new Sydney-based design facility and laboratory.

“We believe that the only way to change the behaviour of billions of people is to make many products that are simply better than what we have today,” said Tim Noakesmith, co-founder and chief commercial officer, Vow Foods. 

In support of this work, the startup announced it has secured an oversubscribed A$7.7 million (US$6 million) Seed round led by Square Peg Capital, and including Tenacious Ventures, Blackbird Ventures, and Grok Ventures. 

“Vow are part of a huge wave of change that we believe will create important companies that move humanity forward,” said Square Peg’s James Tynan. “We’re privileged to be joining them on this journey along with investors like Blackbird, Grok and Tenacious Ventures, that we respect and love working with.”

The oversubscription reflects the rapidly growing amounts of capital being invested in lab-grown meats – driven in part by the pandemic, which was the root cause to widespread disruption to our traditional meat industry and supply chains.

A number of other factors are also playing into the drive to advance lab-created meats. Not only does traditional meat production use one-third of the world’s fresh water and land surface, while also generating one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions, but evidence mounts that the global animal protein production system is not sustainable.

Last year saw cell-based meat, poultry, and seafood company Memphis Meats raise a record-breaking $161 million Series B led by SoftBank Group, Norwest, and Temasek. And now that Singapore is the first market to approve the first culture meat product for sale, funding rounds are bound to grow. 

“The promise of cell cultivation is that it’s actually real meat with all of the nutritional, taste and texture benefits that go along with that,” said Tynen. “At scale it also has the potential to be radically cheaper than any other approach.”

“One of the most popular questions is ‘which technology platform will win?'”

What drew Square Peg to Vow was not only the startup’s unique approach, “outsider” perspective, and passion, but the world-class team that’s been built by co-founders George Peppou and Tim Noakesmith that includes a global expert in muscle development, and a deep tech team of software and physical engineers.

Tynen noted that the startup has “the most audacious vision for the future of food… They’re tackling one of the biggest problems on the planet and have delivered results with less than 1 percent of the resources of its competitors.”

– Lynda Kiernan is editor with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, and HighQuest Group’s Oilseed & Grain News. She is also a contributor to the GAI Gazette. She can be reached at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.com.