Wildtype Raises $100 Million in Series B Funding, Largest Ever for Cell Cultivated Seafood Company
Summary
Wildtype, a San Francisco-based cell-cultivated seafood startup, today announced it has raised a $100 million Series B funding round. The round, the largest to date for a cultivated seafood startup, is being led by private equity firm L Catterton and includes a number of high profile investors such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr. (through his Footprint Coalition and Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions) among others.The new funding comes after the companys June 2021 launch of its pilot production plant. No, the idea was, how could we set something up quickly and modularly, that we could add capacity to, and start learning from as we scaled.And according to Kolbeck, they learned a lot.If we had waited till now to start building the thing, we wouldnt have had the data, we wouldnt have the know-how to inform something like what is a sensible floor plan? But he cautioned that even with its expanded production capacity, the companys overall output will be extremely limited over the next couple of years as they refine their technology and processes.In the early days, we will be a very supply-constrained business, said Kolbeck. I think if you were to kind of get under a nondisclosure agreement and look at each (cell-cultivated seafood) company, all of our technologies are pretty significantly different from one to the next.