Dutch cultivated meat company Mosa Meat has raised €40 million in an oversubscribed funding round. The capital will be used to scale up production processes, drive down production costs, and prepare for market entry.
The round was led by Lowercarbon Capital and M Ventures, with other participants including Dutch state-owned impact investor Invest-NL, LIOF (the regional development agency for the Limburg province), and LEF (the Limburg Energy Fund).
“We are humbled and honoured to welcome both public parties and conventional meat producers”
Significantly, the round also attracted investors with a background in the conventional meat sector, including one of Europe’s largest poultry producers, PHW Group. PHW has been involved in the cultivated meat sector for some time; in 2022, it partnered with Israel’s SuperMeat with the aim of bringing cultivated products to market in Europe. Later that year, PHW CEO Peter Wesjohann called on the EU to grant regulatory approval for cultivated meat so that Europe would not lag behind Asia and the US.
“A daunting task”
In 2023, Mosa Meat opened what is claimed to be the largest cultivated meat campus in the world, featuring a scale-up facility with the capacity to produce tens of thousands of cultivated hamburgers. The company also became the first cultivated meat company to achieve B Corp certification in September.
Mosa Meat is now preparing to host tastings of its cultivated beef, after the Netherlands became the first EU country to allow cultivated meat tastings.
“The overall macroeconomic landscape has been rough in the last two years, which has culled the herd of companies and forced us to be even more strategic and focused on achieving our mission,” said Mosa Meat CEO Maarten Bosch. “As such, we are humbled and honoured to welcome both public parties and conventional meat producers to join this critical journey.
“In an environment that is increasingly polarised, we choose to connect and collaborate, working towards a future where cultivated beef is a real choice for consumers and a complementary solution in the toolbox to combat the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity. Rethinking how we produce great food for a growing planet without destroying it is quite a daunting task and will take many people and organisations to pull in the same direction.”