Cell Based Tech Weekly – BlueNalu $20M Series A, NextGen Agriculture at Black & Veatch, Agriculture Cellulaire France

Categories Weekly Report

Cellular aquaculture company BlueNalu closed a $20 million Series A financing round. The round was co-led by previous BlueNalu investors Stray Dog Capital, CPT Capital, Clear Current Capital and included some notable new strategic investors from the food and agriculture industry: 

  • Nutreco: Dutch animal nutrition and fish feed company. In January, Nutreco announced a strategic partnership with BlueNalu to assist in optimization and input sourcing for BlueNalu’s proprietary growth media.  
  • Griffith Foods: a global product development partner with expertise in sensory tasting.
  • Pulmuone: a leading natural products manufacturer with distribution in Asia and North America
  • Sumitomo Corporation of Americas: a global investor and supplier of metal products, mineral resources, and foods. 
  • Rich Products Ventures: the Corporate Venture arm of Rich Products Corporation, a supplier of icing, cakes, pizza, desserts, appetizers and various bakery products with a growing line of brands in the value-added seafood category.

Background: At the end of 2019, BlueNalu completed a product demo of a whole muscle portion of yellowtail amberjack fish. The company is now ready to focus on increasing production volume and launching the products into a test market within the next two years. The new capital will fund the build out of a pilot production facility in San Diego. https://cellbased.link/io2 

Advancements

👩‍🏫 I recently learned about NextGen Agriculture, an initiative within global engineering company Black & Veatch:

  • Through the NextGen Agriculture initiative, Black & Veatch is providing scale up services, pilot facility designs, and feasibility analyses for cellular agriculture companies. 

Kim Lovan co-founded the initiative in 2017 and informed me that she has seen an increase in customers over the last year. 

Bottom Line: Black & Veatch expertise in scaling oil and gas infrastructure translates to the industrial scaling of cellular agriculture, which involves a front end loaded process to prove technology at specific costs. Black & Veatch is the first global engineering company I’m seeing putting industry experience to work in the cellular agriculture space. 

🇫🇷 In France, a group of industry professionals formed Agriculture Cellulaire France:

Goal: position France as a leader in the cellular agriculture sector and maintain competitiveness within the food industry. https://cellbased.link/t7f

Landscape: Currently, France has one cellular agriculture company, Gourmey, developing cultured foie gras.