BREAKING: SCiFi Foods bags $22m in a16z-led round to bring hybrid alt beef burgers to market faster
Summary
US-based alternative meat startup Artemys Foods has rebranded to SCiFi Foods, officially emerging from stealth mode, and has closed a $22 million Series A round led by leading global VC Andreessen Horowitz.The round, which will finance continued R&D on the companys forthcoming cultivated beef burgers, was also backed by angel investor Peter Rahal co-founder and former CEO of RXBar as well as several other undisclosed angel investors.SCiFis strategy for developing and eventually commercializing cultivated meat has two key components: blending cultivated and plant-based meats and introducing a CRISPR-based gene editing process to the beef cells to make them proliferate more easily outside the cow, according to company co-founder and CEO Joshua Marsh. None Were able to go in with tools like CRISPR and make these very tiny changes: delete a single base pair of DNA, turn the gene off, etc, he explains. Thats sufficient to shift the behavior of the cells, often in a small way, to make them more amenable to growing in a big bioreactor instead of a cow. Thanks to inflation, many consumers are also shifting towards lower quality, value cuts of meat such as ground beef.Theoretically, all of this combined would add up to a wide open opportunity for companies hoping to develop cultivated beef analogues. At least from our understanding, cells for ground chicken products can be manufactured in bioreactors without the need for genetic engineering.He says no one has yet been able to do the same for beef, at least not in a way that would be cost effective.Mosa Meat, for example, unveiled the worlds first cultivated beef burger in 2013 to the cool tune of $300,000 per patty; the company has since brought down that cost but has yet to release an actual product due to regulatory requirements and scientific unknowns.Regulatory requirements aside, Marsh believes that SCiFis bioengineering process combined with the companys blended approach to burgers will allow it to get to market faster at a more affordable price point.We see this as the missing link to be able to solve some of these big challenges of manufacturing cultivated meat at epic scale and [at] a cost which actually makes it affordable as a food product, he says.The Series A funding will primarily go towards R&D as well as marketing strategies and new hires.