Cell Based Tech Weekly – Westworld’s Butcher Plant, Impossible Foods Raises $500M from Celebrities, Cell Cultured Cotton

Categories Weekly Report

For those of you who watched the Season 3 premiere of HBO sci-fi show, Westworld last Sunday you may have noticed the show featured a “butcher”plant of the future.

This particular depiction demonstrates slabs of meat connected to tubes of blood, which is not exactly how lab grown meat companies have explained the science of it working.

Amidst the market annihilation there was a surprisingly significant amount of capital deployed to food + biotech companies this week. Perhaps the COVID-19 pandemic is shedding some light on the importance of alternate food production methods for public health of the planet and the people.

Kicking it off

🍔 Impossible Foods raised an additional $500 million Series F financing bringing the company’s total funding soaring to $1.3 billion. The round was led by a new investor in the company, Mirae Asset Global Investments, a South Korean investment firm. https://cellbased.link/88e4e

  • What this means: Impossible stated the $500 million will primarily be used to accelerate manufacturing scaleup and expansion into international markets, ahem, Asia, while continuing to develop products for these new markets i.e. plant based pork. 
  • Star 🤩 Studded: Additional investors include an impressive round up of celebs including Jay Brown, Common, Kirk Cousins, Paul George, Peter Jackson, Jay-Z, Mindy Kaling, Trevor Noah, Alexis Ohanian, Kal Penn, Katy Perry, Questlove, Ruby Rose, Phil Rosenthal, Jaden Smith, Serena Williams, will.i.am, and Zedd.

💸 Agronomics, the cellular agriculture investment firm, announced a subscription of $500,000 in GALY CO. for an approximate 4.37% stake. https://cellbased.link/d5y

  • GALY Co. is developing cell cultured cotton. Using cotton plant cells, GALY can develop cotton at a faster pace then from traditional agriculture methods and uses less water, land and gas emissions. https://cellbased.link/2ld

Advancements

German based chemical company, Evonik (OTCMKTS: EVKIF) announced a major breakthrough in the production of collagen made from precision fermentation. https://cellbased.link/512

  • Evonik has developed a recombinant technology platform to synthesize animal free collagen at commercial scale. 

Why We Care: Collagen applications can range from bio-fabricated materials to scaffolding for cultured meat. Evonik has the infrastructure and scale-up capabilities for a microbial fermentation production network with six fermentation sites across Europe, the U.S., and Asia. Currently the other company operating in the recombinant collagen space is Geltor.

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