Seven years ago the world’s first cultured meat hamburger was unveiled. Funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, it cost $325,000 to produce and took three months to grow. The company behind that burger, Mosa Meat, set its sights firmly on reducing the time and cost of manufacture believing the future of beef could be slaughter free. In 2019 and 2020 Mosa reached critical technical milestones including an 88x reduction in growth medium cost and removing Fetal Bovine Serum from the production process.
This week Mosa Meat took another big step towards the sale of affordable cultured burgers, closing $55M as part of a larger Series B funding round. The new funds will be used to extend Mosa Meat’s current pilot production facility at its home in Maastricht (Netherlands). The company will also develop an industrial-sized production line, expand its team of fifty and work with regulators to prove the safety of its cultivated beef.
The Series B funding round is led by Luxembourg-based Blue Horizon Ventures, the food technology fund that aims to support and promote a positive global impact on the environment, human health, and animal welfare. Dr. Regina Hecker is joining the board of Mosa Meat with special focus on science, scaling and regulatory. They are joined by Bell Food Group (a prior investor), M Ventures and other mission-based investors and advisors.
“We are very excited to welcome our new partners and see existing partners continue our journey together” said Maarten Bosch, CEO of Mosa Meat. “With their support and capabilities, we have the opportunity to take the next concrete steps to scale production, make progress towards a cleaner, kinder way of making real beef, and ultimately increase the resilience, sustainability, and safety of our global food system“.
“We are excited to be joining Mosa Meat as lead investor in this round” said Dr. Regina Hecker, Partner at Blue Horizon Ventures. “Following a thorough investigation of its technology and team, we are convinced that Mosa Meat is strongly placed to pioneer the scale-up of cultured meat“.
