Investments & Finance

CellulaREvolution Raises £1M, Aims to Transform Cultured Meat Production

British cell-based meat company CellulaREvolution has raised £1M in its latest funding round, with investors including Orange Light Ventures, CPT Capital, and the Northern Accelerator Seed Investment Fund.

CPT Capital is particularly significant because it has previously invested in several highly successful cultured meat startups. These include BluNalu, Memphis Meats, and Aleph Farms.

CellulaREvolution was founded in 2019 with the aim of improving the efficiency of cultured meat production. It hopes to solve two of the most pressing problems faced by the industry — the need for animal-derived serum and the high cost of cell cultivation.

To solve the first problem, CellulaREvolution is developing a synthetic peptide coating that makes animal serum unnecessary, reducing costs and making production more stable.

cultured meat cellbased beef
© Mariya Fedorova-stock.adobe.com

To cut costs further, the company is working on a process called “continuous culturing”. It has developed bioreactors that allow the cells to grow constantly, increasing yields and requiring fewer inputs. While it’s still early days, preliminary data suggest that twice as many cells could be produced in a given time period, using a smaller bioreactor than conventional batch culturing. This has the potential to cut production costs significantly.

Several companies are now making progress towards reducing the cost of cultured meat, which will be necessary to convince consumers to make the switch. In November, Indian company Clear Meat claimed it had achieved price parity with its lab-grown chicken mince. And earlier this month, Israeli company Future Meat Technologies reduced production costs by a thousand times when it produced a quarter pound of cultured chicken for $7.50.

“Currently we have several ongoing collaborations with cultured meat companies where we are jointly testing their specific cell lines with our technology,” CellulaREvolution co-founder and CEO Leo Groenewegen told FoodNavigator. “Positive results have been shown so far and we are keen to move some of these collaborations to a sale.”

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