Mosa Meat raises €40m as it readies lab-grown beef launch

Dutch lab-grown meat pioneer Mosa Meat has raised another €40m (£34.1m) in a fresh funding round to finance the next phase of the company’s plans.

The business will use the money to further scale up production processes and prepare to launch its cultivated beef to consumers in Singapore.

The oversubscribed round was led by Lowercarbon Capital and M Ventures, with other investors including new government-backed partners such as Invest-NL, the Dutch state-owned impact investor. New backers with a background in the conventional meat sector also took part, including the PHW Group, one of Europe’s largest poultry producers.

“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.

“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.”

Mosa Meat is currently preparing its first formal tastings of cultivated beef in the Netherlands after the government approved the consumption of lab-grown meat and seafood in controlled environments last year.

It follows the business starting production at its new 30,000 sq ft “scale-up” factory in Maastricht last year, which gives it the capacity to make tens of thousands of cultivated hamburgers a year.

Mosa now operates from a four facility strong CAMPUS (Center for Advanced Meat Production, Upscaling, and Sustainability), with a total footprint of 79,000 sq ft, and is waiting for an anticipated first market launch in Singapore once it gets the green light from authorities. Singapore gave market approval to the first-ever product with cultivated cells in December 2023, with lab-grown chicken nuggets available to consumers in the country.

Mosa’s founders introduced the world’s first burger grown in a lab using cow cells in 2013, and the company has since raised more than €130m in funding, with an oversubscribed €85m series B round in 2021 and a €7.5m series A in 2018.