California-based food technology startup SCiFi Foods, which recently rebranded from Artemys Foods, has raised $29 million, including a $22 million series A round led by VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, promising to bring cultivated meat to the market at a more affordable price upon the U.S. regulatory approval.
SCiFi Foods also appointed Myra Pasek, who serves as general counsel at Iron Ox, an agriculture technology company combining AI and robotics to improve the sustainability of agriculture, as its new board member. Pasek’s previously served as general counsel at Impossible Foods, and director of communications at Tesla
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The company’s early backers include British rock band Coldplay, which has invested in green tech as part their world tour’s sustainability initiatives, as well as Valor Siren Ventures, BoxGroup, Entree Capital, and Prelude Ventures.
The fundraise announcement comes as cultured meat gains massive interest among consumer- and food tech-focused investors who believe the sector could help significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions generated from traditional animal farming, while providing meat eaters with the same texture, flavors, and nutrients of regular meat products.
Vijay Pande, General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz, believes SCiFi Foods is uniquely positioned to compete in the space, and to be a strategic portfolio brand, saying: “Cultivated meat will disrupt the trillion-dollar global market for meat products, with huge benefits to the planet. However, there are major cost hurdles, and SCiFi’s technology and approach was the first we felt that truly has the potential to both scale quickly and to drastically reduce cost.”
Cost Effective Manufacturing Through DNA Editing Tech
Typically, cell-based products are produced by acquiring and banking stem cells from animals, which are then cultivated in bioreactors where these cells are fed with an oxygen-rich cell culture medium before they differentiate into the skeletal muscle, fat, and connective tissues that make up regular meat, according to Good Food Institute. The process takes approximately two to eight weeks, depending on the type of meat produced.
SCiFi Foods says DNA editing technology Crispr is able to help it produce cultured meat at a lower … [+]
While a handful of countries are spearheading the movement with Singapore becoming the first in the world that allows the commercialization of lab-grown meat in 2020, and China recently including alt protein products in its five-year agricultural plan, regulatory hurdles remain in the U.S. despite an earlier agreement the FDA and the USDA co-established in 2019 to divide oversight authority for the sector.
Among all the companies that are leading the latest lab-grown meat frenzy, including Upside Foods, previously raised $400 million in April; and Future Meat Technologies; Eat Just, the parent of Good Meat, claims it’s building the world’s largest bioreactors that will grow more than 13,000 tonnes of chicken and beef per year after becoming the only company to sell cultured meat in Singapore.
But Joshua March, cofounder of SCiFi Foods, argues they’re able to manufacture cell-based beef with higher scalability and at a much lower cost mainly thanks to Crispr technology that “enables us to make highly targeted, extremely small changes to DNA — for example, just deleting a single DNA base pair.”
March explained to me: “This is different from GMO in that it does not add any new/different, or transgenic DNA, to the cells that we use for our products. We use these very minor changes to shift the behavior of our cells so that they are more cost effective to manufacture. We also use automation, such as liquid handling robots, to be able to discover the impact of a really big variety of tiny changes. This approach to genetic engineering was pioneered in the fermentation space, by companies like Zymergen, where [our] cofounder, Kasia Gora PhD., was actually an early employee, and used for food applications such as engineering yeast.”
“We think that is absolutely key to getting the cost of cultivated meet down to a level where it can eventually reach parity with conventional meat,” he added.
Operational Facilities To Get Regulatory Approval
SCiFi Foods currently employs about 30 workers, and has recently moved to a 16,000-square-foot R&D facility in the Bay Area, of which 10,000 square feet are reserved for its lab space, according to March, and this is a pivotal step to getting cultured meat approved eventually in the U.S.
“We feel extremely confident, and have a reasonably commercially viable timeframe [for commercialization]. The FDA and the USDA have been super engaged with us,” he said. “In order to get through regulatory approval in the U.S., we need to have a basic facility the government can inspect, and a consistent process, but there’s a lack of actual pilot facilities that are fully commissioned, and up and running to go through approval.
“I think that’s just a matter of time,” March added. “I’d be very surprised if some companies don’t have products approved on the market this year, especially now that some pilot facilities have been coming online over the last 12 months.”
SCiFi Foods plans to launch its own branded products through food service in the near term before ultimately entering retail and direct-to-consumer.