By 2030, the global meat market is set to reach half a billion dollars. However, for many companies that have emerged in the past five years, this type of technology is still in the R&D stage.
Meat, also known as cultured meat, is animal meat, but instead of slaughtering the animal to obtain it, the cells are collected from the animal and produced in a laboratory, and then assembled into a tissue structure that resembles the same meat we have. They all eat.
We have seen a few trained meat companies launch their products. For example, Novel Farms has pork loin, and Blue Seafood, a German company that produces lab-grown seafood, unveiled fish sticks and fish balls last month. The same goes for Dutch-based Meatable with its sauces, scifi dishes with burgers, and chicken for UPSIDE dishes.
However, the process of producing cultured meat has historically been “very difficult and very expensive,” Denise Kent, founder and CEO of Prolific Machines, told TechCrunch. That’s what his company is about to change.
“You have to use these growth media proteins, which are very expensive things — one of the proteins we’re replacing is 30,000 times more expensive than a gram of gold,” he added. “Because of this, it’s very difficult to measure anything because you have to use these proteins.”
Kent, who specializes in stem cell biology, said these proteins have been used for decades, primarily in the biopharmaceutical industry. The technology works for big-budget pharmaceuticals, but it’s not so good when you’re trying to make a high-volume, low-margin product like meat, he added.
With an idea for better proteins, he met physicist Max Huisman and machine learning engineer Dylan Jones and convinced them to quit their jobs and start Prolific Machines in 2020.
That said, Prolific Machines believes it has a unique production method for cultured meat cells and is coming out of stealth mode with a combined $42 million in seed and Series A funding for what Kent calls a “biological assembly line.”
The company aims to do for biology what Henry Ford did for automobiles at the turn of the 20th century. The technology, which is still in its infancy, is a way to grow and control cells without the need for expensive recombinant proteins for cell production, he said. Prolific Machines markets products, but licenses its infrastructure to other skilled meat companies.
“At that time, nobody owned a car except the very rich. It was Ford that changed things,” Kent said. “They built an assembly line and found a way to make cars at a price that regular people could afford. That changed the industry. You went from hundreds of car companies to just three companies with over 70% of the market.”
He believes the same thing happens in the cultured meat industry: There are hundreds of companies now, but “most of them die because they don’t have a way to produce cultured meat at a good enough price.” Those who find a way will survive,” he added.
Prolific Machines was part of the SOSV Indibio program in 2021. SOSV led the pre-seed round of Prolific Machines. Meanwhile, for the new round of capital, the seed-round was led by Arvind Gupta, a Mayfield partner, and the Series A was led by Bill Gates–founded Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
“I have never considered investing in another cultured meat company, but when Denise showed me what they were doing, I was blown away by their innovative approach to reinventing the assembly line for food production,” Gupta wrote. “It’s my goal to help reverse climate change by partnering with incredible teams, and I’m confident that Prolific Machines will win the race for sustainable food production.”
Joining in the two rounds was a group of VC firms and individual investors, including David Adelman, Mark Cuban, The Kraft Family, David Rubenstein, Michael Rubin, Breyer Capital, The SALT Fund, Purple Orange Ventures, Fred Blackford, Jake Poliskin, Matt Katz and Baroque future venture. Add to that a group of celebrities and restaurateurs, including Kevin Love, Tobias Harris, Meek Mill, Ciara and Russell Wilson, Emily Ratajkowski, Maverick Carter, Sean Feeney, Michael Shulson, Mark Butcher and RJ Melman.
Kent said the Series A was raised a year ago, but the company is now coming out of hiding as it prepares to raise a much more serious “$170 million-ish” Series B in the first quarter of 2023. 25,000-square-foot headquarters in Emeryville, Calif., and will ramp up hiring to expand its assembly programs, including fish, poultry and beef.
Meanwhile, the institute expects to be done in the spring of 2023. Plans for the company’s first product include unprocessed wagyu, which means ground beef. Prolific Machines also has a number of high-profile chefs – whom Kent can’t name right now – who have partnered with the company and agreed to use the original meat products.
