US-based startup, Omeat has successfully raised US$40 million in funding, which will allow it to scale cultivated meat production involving the humane extraction of growth factors and other components from ‘healthy, living cows’.
Omeat, established by tissue engineer and ex-Harvard professor Dr. Ali Khademhosseini, had raised US$3.5 million in seed funding in 2021 and US$36.5 million in series A funding in 2022 backed by S2G Ventures, Google Ventures (GV), Bold Capital Partners, Tyson Ventures, Rethink Food, Trailhead Capital, and Cavallo Ventures.
Omeat is currently building a pilot plant in Los Angeles that will be operational later this year.
According to Dr Ali, Omeat Founder and CEO, the company can achieve price parity if it operates at scale with 10,000 litre bioreactors planned at its pilot plant.
Instead of using fetal bovine serum (FBS), a nutrient-rich liquid harvested from fetuses taken from pregnant cows during slaughter, Omeat extracts key components such as growth factors from the plasma of living cows on its farm. The plasma is withdrawn in a pain-free process much the same as that used in human plasma donation.
Omeat hooks up cows to a plasmapheresis machine that collects blood, separates out the plasma and returns the remaining blood components to the cow. The plasma then undergoes additional processing steps enabling Omeat to extract the growth components that it requires, while not affecting the cows (animals), a more humane and scalable approach as compared to FBS. It is also a far cheaper process than buying recombinant proteins made by genetically engineered microbes via precision fermentation. Dr Ali added, “With one cow providing weekly plasma, we can create many cows’ worth of meat annually.”
This is the future path towards environmental sustainability, and Omeat aims to be a bridge to the future of the meat industry. While, cultivated meat initial goal is to displace animal farming, this approach however enable a 95% reduction in cattle production and transform the unit economics of cultivated meat. In a comparison, Dr Ali mentioned that “if one raise a cow for slaughter after about 3 years, he may get up to 300kg of meat per cow. Over 3 years that would be up to 100 kilos per year. With Omeat, one cow can provide ingredients that will produce 2,000 kg of meat per year or 6,000 kg of meat over 3 years, translating to 20x more meat.
Dr. Elliot Swartz, Principal Scientist, cultivated meat at The Good Food Institute said, “It is really energizing to see one of the world’s most renowned tissue engineers throw their hat in the ring and be confident in being able to develop a cost-effective approach for cultivated meat manufacturing.”
