Californian cultured meat startup New Age Meats has raised $2M in funding via convertible debt. This seed extension funding brings the total amount raised by the company to $7M.
After a successful seed funding round last year, New Age Meats is aiming for a Series A round in 2021. The additional funding will allow it to bring its hybrid cultured and plant-based pork products to market more quickly. To this end, it has hired several former Impossible Foods employees, as well as bioengineers with experience in product development and scaling.
Cultured meat is beginning to take off worldwide, with the EU investing 2.7M euros in cultured meat biotech, UC Davis receiving $3.5M from the US government for research, and China considering a national strategy to allow it to make progress in developing lab-grown meat.
New Age Meats’ first products are pork sausages and dumplings, which according to the company are more realistic than any others currently available. But as with all cultured meat products, making them affordable is the biggest challenge.
“Ultimately, we will fail if our products are too expensive and low volume to be served anywhere but luxury restaurants,” says Brian Spears, the company’s CEO. “We’ve focused relentlessly on driving down the cost and scaling production of our product: hybrid cultivated and plant-based meat that doesn’t sacrifice on flavour. We want to make the world a better place by making the better decisions easy. We are well on our way to bringing that vision to market after our upcoming Series A.”
