Cell Based Tech Weekly – Aleph Farms 📞 Black & Veatech to Scale-Up, Pivot Bio $100M Series C, N’Ice Cream is Here

Israeli cell based meat company Aleph Farms and engineering and infrastructure company, Black & Veatech (B&V) NextGen Ag announced a strategic partnership. https://cellbased.link/64k

• Under Wraps: Most of the details surrounding the partnership are confidential including what phase of development the project is in.
  
• What We Do Know: B&V NextGen Ag is providing engineering consulting services to Aleph Farms to help overcome process scale-up and sustainability goals, which are — eliminating emissions associated with its meat production by 2025 and reach the same net-zero emissions across its entire supply chain by 2030.
  
• Why We Care: Aleph Farms technology enables the ability to  “co-culture” cell types including muscle fibers, fat, connective tissue, and blood vessels which are integral to developing a thick and structured tissue (like a steak). Connective tissue has a critical role in tissue engineering as it provides the vascularized system for cells to survive. It is possible that without a blood vessel network, cells will not be able to replicate and form considerable amounts of muscle fibers in vitro. 

Investments

Pivot Bio completed a $100 Million Series C funding round to ramp up production of engineered microbes that fix nitrogen into the soil. https://cellbased.link/lko 

• Why Fix Nitrogen? Plants need nitrogen to grow. Crops like corn and wheat suck nitrogen out of the soil. The traditional approach has been to use synthetic fertilizers to maintain the monoculture grow cycle. 

• Pivot Bio is seeking a share of the $65 billion market with a disruptive technology that replaces the need for synthetic fertilizers with microbes that have been genetically programmed to fix nitrogen. 

• 2020 Outlook: 2020 is the second sales year for the company’s initial product used for corn crops. According to a company press release, Pivot had strong sales in 2019 and is on track to sign on more than 150 sales reps with access to more than five million corn acres across 20+ states.
  
• High profile investors include Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Temasek,  DCVC, Prelude Ventures; Spruce Capital Partners; Codon Capital; Bunge Ventures; Continental Grain Company; Tekfen Ventures; Pavilion Capital; and individual investors Alan Cohen and Roger Underwood. To date, the company has raised $186 million in capital.

Available Now!

🍧 It did not take long for cell based milk company, Perfect Day to put their highly coveted GRAS certification to work 

• Through a partnership with San Francisco based Smitten Ice Cream you can now purchase “N’Ice” cream made with Perfect Day non-animal whey protein. 
• At $12/pint this is only $1 more than Smitten Ice cream regular dairy pints → this is luxe ice cream we are talking about! 

• What We Know: The product is being marketed as vegan & lactose free and Smitten refers to the N’Ice cream as being made with “Perfect Day™ clean-label base.”
  
• Head scratching emoji: Do consumers understand what non-animal whey protein, clean label base means?