Dutch cultivated-meat company Meatable has raised $35m in new funding, taking the total invested in the business to date to $95m.
Meatable said it will use the new funds to scale and speed up the point when it commercially launches its pork products.
The company revealed it is also establishing a presence in the US, having already done so in Singapore. These are the first two countries to give the green light to meat grown in a lab.
Founded in 2018, Meatable, which is developing cultivated meat including pork sausages and pork dumplings, claims to have the fastest production process in the cell-based field. The company says it can move from cell to cultivated sausage in just eight days.
Meatable is targeting having cultivated sausages and pork dumplings available in “selected restaurants and retailers” in Singapore in 2024.
The company has already held its first external tasting events in the city-state, following approval from the Singapore Food Agency (SFA), and has started production of its products on the ground there with local cultivated meat manufacturer Esco Aster.
Daan Luining, co-founder and CTO of Meatable, said: “Cultivated meat is the next revolution. Meatable holds the promise to have unbeatable efficiency in comparison to both traditional meat production and the cultivated meat industry average, without compromising on quality.
“To achieve our vision of providing the world with harm-free meat, we have to be price competitive, and this means efficiency is key. This new funding will help us to further scale up, bring down production time even more and start producing cultivated meat for the world.”
In an interview in May 2021, Luining told Just Food that to succeed in the cell-based meat area, companies need to “have something unique”.
Meatable’s latest funding round was led by Agronomics and saw Invest-NL join as a new investor, contributing $17 m. The round also drew renewed support from existing investors.
Jim Mellon, co-founder of Agronomics, said: “There is a real need to find a solution that can provide meat at the scale needed to address a growing mass market. The latest funding round will allow the company to scale up production in Singapore, and soon in the US, as it moves towards commercialisation as part of its go-to-market strategy.”
Agronomics has previously invested in cell-based pet-food company Good Dog Food.
In the US, cultivated meat companies saw regulatory doors open in June after the Food and Drug Administration gave its approval to Upside Foods and Good Meat to sell their lab-grown chicken products there.
In Europe, Israel-based Aleph Farms has submitted applications in Switzerland and the UK to sell its cultivated beef steaks under the Aleph Cuts brand.
[Link src="https://www.just-food.com/interviews/cell-based-meat-company-meatable-daan-luining/" title="Interview, May 2021: “You have to have something unique in this field” – cell-based meat company Meatable’s Daan Luining"]
