News

Mosa Meat gets €7.5m funding

23 Jul 2018

Mosa Meat, a spin off company from Maastricht University, has announced that it has raised €7.5M to bring cultured meat to market by 2021. It is said to be the first investment in a European cultured meat company. The Dutch start-up says it presented the world’s first beef burger made directly from cow cells in 2013.

The round was co-led by M Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of science and technology company Merck, and Bell Food Group. They are joined by mission-based investors, including the Glass Wall Syndicate.

Mosa Meat was co-founded by Prof Mark Post, who created the first cultured hamburger in 2013. Early investors include Google’s Sergey Brin. Mosa Meat will use the Series A funding to develop an end-to-end process for cultured meat production at significantly reduced cost. The endpoint of the funding will allow the company to prepare for the construction of a pilot production plant for the introduction of a premium product in 2021.

“We are delighted to join forces with M Ventures and Bell Food Group to create the future of meat,” said Mosa Meat CEO Peter Verstrate. “M Ventures brings strong experience in earlystage 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,” he added.

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

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