Memphis Meats, a California based developer of technologies to manufacture seafood, meat and poultry from animal cells, has reportedly announced that it has raised $161 million in financing from investors, including Norwest, Softbank Group and Temasek, which is an investment fund supported by the government of Singapore. The investment makes the total financing of the company to $180 million. Previous investors included individual investors as well as institutional investors like Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Cargill, Future Ventures, Fifty Years, Threshold Ventures, Kimbal Musk, Tyson Foods, CPT Capital and Finistere. Other companies such as Aleph farms, Mosa Meat, Meatable, Future Meat Technologies, and Higher Streaks are also looking to develop meat grown from animal cell as a substitute for animal husbandry, whose impact on the environment is a major contributor to climate change and deforestation across the globe. As per investors, advancements in bio-engineering, computational biology and materials science are generating new opportunities for companies to advance and commercialize technologies that could substitute traditional farming with innovative ways to produce foods which have a relatively low carbon footprint and could bring about an age of superabundance. The race to see who would be the first to market with a product has begun. Bruce Friedrich, executive director, Good Food Institute, stated that for the entire industry, an investment of this kind reinforces the confidence that this innovative technology is here right now, rather than some far-flung endeavor in the future. Once proof of concept is obtained for cultivated meat, making it a commercially available product at a reasonable price point, it should speed up the investment and interest in the industry. Friedrich further stated that the very first prototype had been produced six years ago and the idea of cultivated meat has been percolating for nearly a century. About Memphis Meats: Memphis Meats is producing a new form of farming to change the way meat is generally made. The solution of the company is to develop cutting-edge technology to produce real meat, not by including animals in the process, but by farming animal cells. This way the real meat is better for the body as well as the planet. Source credit: https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/22/memphis-meats-raised-161-million-from-softbank-group-norwest-and-temasek/
