Cultured meat start-up Mosa Meat secures 7.5m euro funding

Dutch cultured meat start-up Mosa Meat has received €7.5 million in a Series A funding round led by M Ventures and Bell Food Group, as the company seeks to make cultured meat products commercially available by 2021.

In 2013, Mosa Meat produced the ‘world’s first’ beef burger created directly from cow cells following years of research conducted at Maastricht University, and the development of the first product cost €250,000.

Mosa Meat says it will use the new funding to develop a new end-to-end process for cultured meat production at a “significantly reduced cost”.

The funding will also pay for the construction of a pilot production plant, which the company claims will allow the introduction of a new premium cultured meat product in 2021.

Mosa Meat CEO Peter Verstrate said: “We are delighted to join forces with M Ventures and Bell Food Group to create the future of meat.

“M Ventures brings strong experience in early-stage financing of science-based companies like ours and has added tremendous value throughout the fundraising process, while Bell Food Group brings strong downstream capabilities in meat processing and distribution. We think this is a perfect collaboration.”

“M Ventures, being the corporate venture capital fund of Merck, is the perfect door-opener to Merck’s deep expertise in culturing cells and producing high quality and scalable cell media. This is significant given that the cell media currently comprises 80% of the cost of cultured meat.”

Lorenz Wyss, CEO of Bell Food Group added: “Meat demand is soaring and in future won’t be met by livestock agriculture alone.

“We believe this technology can become a true alternative for environment-conscious consumers, and we are delighted to bring our know-how and expertise of the meat business into this strategic partnership with Mosa Meat.”

Alexander Hoffmann, principal of M Ventures said: “Replacing traditional meat production with cultured meat would have a huge impact on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, it would free up a large amount of resources that are now used for meat production worldwide and will completely disrupt an old-established and currently unsustainable industry.

“We’re incredibly excited to be leading this investment into Mosa Meat, a company at the unique cross-section of food and biotech”.