Cultivated meat companies spent much of the last decade promising to help fend off the climate crisis while also helping to wean the world off animal agriculture. However, as the industry transitioned from bench scale to pilot facilities and eventually to scaled manufacturing, costs increased and timelines lengthened. This shift happened just as the venture capital world began to pull back on big bets in new areas outside of AI.
The result has been a monumental struggle for cultivated meat startups. Major players, such as Upside and Eat Just, scaled back plans to build large-scale manufacturing plants, while several companies shut down or were acquired.
One interesting wrinkle in this corrective period has been the movement of intellectual property in the form of patents, cell lines, and technical knowledge. As startups look for new paths through acquisition, merger, or wind-down, significant cultivated meat IP is changing hands. In one case, key assets have even been open-sourced. The acquisition activity around IP began in earnest last year, although early signs appeared before that.
Last week, Fork & Good announced it had acquired Orbillion, combining two of the more sophisticated platforms in cultivated pork and beef. Fork & Good has been working on cultivated pork since 2018, and Orbillion, founded in 2020, brings cultivated wagyu beef technology into the fold. The deal creates what the companies say is the largest IP portfolio in cultivated red meat.
“We’re not asking food manufacturers to wait five to ten years for supply chain solutions,” Fork & Good CEO Niya Gupta said in the announcement. “We’re giving them the ability to improve their products right now.”
Orbillion’s CEO Patricia Bubner, now COO of the combined entity, framed the deal as strategic consolidation aligned with a more pragmatic era that is margin-focused, customer-driven, and centered on technical execution rather than R&D alone.
A few months earlier, Meatable acquired Uncommon Bio’s cultivated meat platform, bringing over key technology, cell lines, IP assets, and technical staff as Uncommon shifted toward therapeutics. The acquisition strengthened Meatable’s multi-species lineup and its non-GMO platform, further concentrating Europe’s cultivated meat expertise under fewer roofs.
And just weeks before Fork & Good’s move, Gourmey merged with Vital Meat to form PARIMA. The deal brings “Gourmey’s full-stack industrial platform, which includes premium cultivated duck products validated by Michelin-starred chefs and independently verified production costs below €7/kg, with Vital Meat’s poultry cell-line technology developed from nearly 25 years of avian cell research at Groupe Grimaud, a global reference in animal genetics and biotechnology.”
The merged Paris-based entity unites Gourmey’s cultivated duck and foie gras technology with Vital Meat’s chicken platform, consolidating more than 70 patent filings and regulatory dossiers into a single operation targeting the European market.
Taken together, these deals signal a decisive shift: fewer players, deeper portfolios, and stronger technical moats. The companies that survive are those with enough IP, regulatory traction, and cross-species optionality to prove viable unit economics before pursuing scale.
And Then There’s Open Access
While consolidation was expected, another move announced in October was surprising, both in timing and format.
In mid-October, the Good Food Institute announced it had acquired bovine cell lines and serum-free media formulations from shuttered startup SCiFi Foods and partnered with Tufts University to release them for open research access. The move effectively open-sourced core cultivated beef IP, saving future startups and researchers years of development and millions of dollars.
“By making these cell lines and media broadly accessible to the cultivated meat ecosystem, researchers and companies have a new starting line – one that’s now closer to the finish line of bringing new products to market,” said GFI’s VP of science Amanda Hildebrand. “SCiFi’s pioneering work is like a baton in a relay. Given our role in the field, GFI was able to ensure that baton didn’t drop, and through our partnership with Tufts, copies of that same baton will be handed off to scientists and startups around the world, enabling more people to join the race.”
Joshua March, SCiFi’s co-founder, put it more bluntly: “It took us four years and tens of millions to develop these cells. Now future startups will be able to leapfrog us.”
I sat next to March in the spring of 2024, while in San Francisco, during a tasting of SCiFi’s cultivated meat. At the time, he gave no indication of the company’s financial struggles, but just a couple of months later, SCiFi shut down. Credit to Joshua and the team for working with GFI to make this technology available, potentially enabling breakthroughs for researchers who can use the SCiFi cell lines and media formulations as a jump start.
Cultivated meat still has a long road ahead. Some states have taken an antagonistic stance despite USDA approval for three (now four) companies to sell product in the United States. Investors remain cautious due to long scaling cycles and the challenge of convincing consumers that cultivated meat can be both tasty and healthy. Still, the industry is taking necessary and sometimes painful steps to prepare for the next stage. Combined with promising advances in manufacturing technologies, such as those from Prolific Machines, there is reason to believe the final chapter of the cultivated meat story has yet to be written.
