This week Japan-based startup Integriculture announced they had raised $7 million to accelerate its efforts to build a cellular agriculture infrastructure platform to scale cell-cultured meat production.
Integriculture, which grew out of founder Yuki Hanyu’s ShojinMeat Project – an early effort to create a DIY cell-cultured meat community – is creating an end-to-end cell-cultured meat production system in CulNet. According to Integriculture, CulNet is a framework concept that incorporates all the steps and related technology required for the cell-cultured meat production process, from the creation of culture medium to processing to the end-product bioreactor.
Integriculture outlined the various pieces of the CulNet platform in June of 2021 when they announced the CulNet Consortium:
- Standardized culture media: Recipes that are fundamentally different from the existing media (basal media). Basal media are the raw material for all cultured cell products, and a different type is required for each kind (food, material, medical, etc.).
- CulNet SystemTM hardware: Hardware that lets people use the CulNet SystemTM across a broad spectrum of uses, whether it’s in mass production or just at home.
- Product bioreactors: Bioreactors that are used to make things like the products’ edible parts. We estimate that a variety of animals used as agricultural products will be a source for the cells.
- Cell product processing: The process control that is needed to meet the products’ processing and safety requirements (cell components and culture supernatant).
- Cell sources: The process that is used to extract and culture cells from livestock and fishery resources and the systems that enable the whole sequence of processes to be completed right where the cell sources are produced—tailoring them to their intended use, source animal species, etc.
For the last couple of years, Integriculture has made it clear it hoped to have a cell-cultured meat industry build up around its CulNet concept, and with this recent funding, it looks like it definitely has momentum for this. However, one thing I found curious in this latest announcement was this sentence: “The proprietary CulNet System is capable of inexpensively culturing animal cells of all types and species without exogenous growth factors.”
When Integriculture announced the CulNet consortium last June, it sounded as if the company was essentially open-sourcing its technology for collaboration and development. In the latest announcement, this use of the word proprietary – and complete lack of any mention of the Consortium – makes me wonder if Integriculture is pulling back a bit and putting up guardrails around its intellectual properrty. If you’re an investor that would certainly be attractive since there is lots of money to be made in hardware, consumables, services, and technology licensing in a future multi-billion dollar industry if you own a significant amount of the IP.
Beyond the company’s designs on becoming a critical cell-cultured meat infrastructure provider, they also are looking to create their own consumer-facing product in cell-cultured foie gras. The product, which Hanyu said will be a hybrid product that combines both cell-cultured meat and plant-based components, is now expected to be introduced later this year.
Leave a Reply