US – SCiFi Foods, a Bay Area-based food tech startup, has announced that it has raised US$22 million Series A round, to be used to scale R&D efforts, build out the leadership team, and market the company.
The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), making it a16z’s first investment in the growing cultivated meat market.
The company, formerly known as Artemys Foods, also announced that it will be adding a new board member, Myra Pasek, the General Counsel of IronOx.
Pasek will be utilizing her expertise from Tesla and Impossible Foods to help SCiFi Foods bring its novel plant-based and cultivated meat hybrid through regulatory approval to the market.
Since its founding, SCiFi Foods has raised a total of $29 million from investors including Valor Siren Ventures, BoxGroup, Entrée Capital, Prelude Ventures, and more.
Vijay Pande, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz said: “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 were the first we felt that truly has the potential to both scale quickly and to drastically reduce cost.”
Upside Foods raises US$400m to construct commercial production facility
Earlier, Upside Foods, formerly known as Memphis Meats, closed a US$400 million series C funding round to construct a commercial production facility with an annual capacity of tens of millions of pounds of cultivated meat products.
This new raise is expected to tap into the industry’s biggest opportunities around scale and place the company’s valuation at over US$1 billion, Upside Foods said.
The latest round was co-led by Temasek, a global investment company headquartered in Singapore, and Abu Dhabi Growth Fund (ADG) and a broad coalition of financial, impact and strategic investors, reflecting growing global interest.
Other new investors include Baillie Gifford, Givaudan, John Doerr, SALT fund, and Synthesis Capital. They are joined by existing investors Bill Gates, Cargill, Cercano Management, CPT Capital, and Dentsu Ventures.
Additionally, Singapore-based global investors EDBI, Kimbal and Christiana Musk, Norwest Venture Partners, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, SOSV’s Indie Bio, and Tyson Foods also took part in the seeding.
The facility will be able to produce any species of meat in both ground and whole cut formats, with an initial focus on the chicken.
The funds will also help build a robust supply chain for critical cell feed components to reduce costs and enable greater scale.
Other priorities for Upside Foods include enhancing consumer education and investing in R&D for the next generation of cultivated meat products.
Liked this article? Subscribe to Food Business Africa News, our regular email newsletters with the latest news insights from Africa and the World’s food and agro-industry. SUBSCRIBE HERE.
