Singapore to Invest $535 million in R&D, including Cultured Meat and Robots

Cell-based meat is about to get another big shot in the arm.

Yesterday the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Singapore announced the RIE2020 plan, which will allocate S$724 million ($535 million) to boost the city-state’s economy and to bolster R&D efforts in cell therapy manufacturing, digital technology (like AI and robotics), and sustainable urban food production.

Up to S$144 million (~$106 million) of the funds in RIE2020 will be allocated to the new Singapore Food Story R&D program, which will focus on urban agriculture, cultured meat, and microbial protein production. This isn’t super surprising, since we recently made the prediction that cell-based meat will debut in Asia first, thanks to more flexible government regulation and high consumer interest.

In fact, there’s already at least one cultured meat company (that we know of) operating out of Singapore. Shiok Meats is developing cell-based crustaceans and just became the first clean meat company to be accepted into the Y Combinator accelerator program. Hopefully this influx of funds from the government will help cell-based meat companies scale up and become more affordable more quickly.

Singapore recently announced a goal to produce 30 percent of its own food by 2030. Growing meat in labs is a good place to start. Scientists are apparently also working on breeding fast-growing, disease-resistant tilapia that can survive in Singapore’s brackish water, and figuring out ways to use microbes to grow protein.