Investors eat up Orbillion Bio’s plans for lab-grown wagyu beef, elk, and bison
Orbillion Bio’s plans to make high end meats in a lab have investors lining up for a seat at the company’s cap table.
Mere weeks after launching from Y Combinator’s famous accelerator program, the Silicon Valley-based potential purveyor of premium lamb loins, elk steaks, bison burgers and more has managed to haul in $5 million in financing.
The company’s led by Patricia Bubner, Gabrial Levesque Tremblay, and Samet Yidrim, who between them have over thirty years working in bioprocessing and the biopharmaceuticals industry.
Foodtech investor Lever VC holds fourth close of Fund I at $46m
A package of Beyond Meat Inc. plant-based sausage is displayed for a photograph in Tiskilwa, Illinois, U.S., on Tuesday, April 23, 2019.
April 14, 2021
Lever VC has made the fourth close of its Lever VC Fund I at $46 million as it gears up to ramp up investments in early-stage alternative protein startups around the world. The firm is slated to make the final close of its fund by June this year.
Following its first close of $23 million in mid-2020, the fund’s third and fourth close include the addition of three corporate strategic investors from Europe and Asia, said Lever VC in a statement on Tuesday. These strategic investors include one of the world’s biggest agri-food companies that has over $50 billion in annual revenue, it said, without naming this limited partner (LP).
Thursday 8 April 2021
The dairy-free cheese fridge at your local health food store could stand as a monument to the human capacity for both boundless creativity and self-deception. Roam its chilled confines and you might find ersatz cashew-nut camembert or blue-veined wedges of coconut-derived faux stilton. There may be pale logs of rice starch mozzarella, or chickpea flour formed into a ridged truckle of imitation parmesan. These products point to an ever-expanding galaxy of choices and a buoyant industry where, according to The Good Food Institute, sales grew by 18 per cent in the US in 2019 (compared with just one per cent growth for traditional animal-derived cheese). There is a revolution underway; an artisanal boom in plant-based fermentation far better than what was available even a decade ago. And forecasts predict the global vegan cheese market to almost triple in worth, to $7 billion (£5.1 billion), by 2030.
CellRx in the UK working on growth factors for cell cultured meat, using a variety of expression systems from genetically engineered plants to fungi, yeast, and bacteria.
“But I think we are well positioned because we ve been doing this for a few years, said Ravi, who said Richcore is also working with several food companies in the emerging precision fermentation space, offering its R&D, scale-up and manufacturing expertise to help them scale up.
We re not starting from scratch. We also do a lot of high throughput screening [of microbial hosts]
to identify the strains of bacteria, yeast and fungi that will give the best yield of factors.”
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