Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
The Problem with Wood (HD)
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
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PVcase, a Lithuanian solar project design software startup, raised a $100M round led by Highland Europe, Energize, and Elephant (FN)
Avnos, a startup developing hybrid direct air capture tech for CO2removal, raised $80M in funding from ConocoPhillips, JetBlue Ventures, and Shell Ventures (BW)
Carbon credit ratings startup Sylvera raised a $57M Series B led by Balderton Capital (FN)
Maka Motors, a two-year-old Indonesian electric vehicle maker, has raised a $37.6 million seed round, one of Southeast Asia’s biggest seed fundings, to mass produce its two-wheeled EVs. AV Ventures, Korea’s SV Investment and East Ventures co-led the financing. TechCrunch has more here.
Terabase Energy, a startup building digital and automation solutions for solar power plants, raised a $25M round led by Fifth Wall (BW)
Isometric, a 20-month-old, U.K.-based carbon removal registry and science platform, has raised $25 million in seed funding co-led by Lowercarbon Capital and Plural. (TC)
Aviwell, a two-year-old startup based in Toulouse, France, that aims to develop natural and sustainable animal feed at a fraction of the cost of existing products, raised a $10.1 million seed round. Elaia Partners and MFS Impact Investment Development of Boston were the co-leads. (TC)
️Verse, a San Francisco startup that helps companies invest in clean energy assets in order to lower their overall carbon exposure, raised a $5.75 million seed round. Coatue was the deal lead, while Twine Ventures, MCJ Collective, firstminute capital, Collaborative Fund, Future Positive, and Incite.org also participating. Tech Funding News has more here.
Carbon13, a two-year-old London startup whose incubator programs seek to support European ventures that reduce the world's carbon emissions, raised a $2.2 million seed round from investors including True Ventures. More here.
Green Theory
Lab-grown meat gaining heat
Last month, the US became the second country (after Singapore) to approve lab-grown meat for commercial sale. While humanitarian, restaurateur and chef Jose Andrés will be serving cultivated chicken in DC from one of two approved companies (Good Meat), don’t expect to find lab-grown meat in the grocery store over the next few seasons.
What exactly is lab-grown meat? And if it’s such a good idea, backed by billions in VC cash, what’s the holdup?
Lab report
If you’re new to lab-grown meat, it’s quite different from other prominent alternative proteins. Lab-grown, cultured, or cultivated meat is genuine flesh, not veggie patties.
To make this new meat, companies take cell samples from animals (such as from a living cow’s muscle) to capture a starting blueprint, which is considered relatively renewable without going back to the cow. With the blueprint cells set in a controlled tank, operators apply a growth medium, which nourishes the cow cells until they’re strong enough to divide and grow. Following this method, cultivated meat companies suggest they can substantially reduce the land and water use of meat production, as well as lifecycle emissions.
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The first step admittedly requires using part of the animal, but it only needs to be done once to start a line of meat that could, in theory, feed millions. The second step, of applying the right growth medium, generally uses a grotesque, expensive, far-from-vegan ingredient: fetal bovine serum (FBS). For this reason, most lab-grown burgers require roughly 100 cow pregnancies.
In spite of the animal inputs, the fact we can grow full cuts of meat outside an animal is groundbreaking in the history of our cuisine, agriculture, and evolution. Promisingly, more and more companies are finding workarounds to the FBS growth medium, though both US-approved firms are still using the fraught serum.
Ditching FBS
Making a big splash with a peer-reviewed publication in Nature Food, Mosa Meat proudly announced they have an FBS-free production technique, late last year. Mosa Meat claims they used RNA sequencing to study how proteins differentiate at the critical moment when FBS is no longer needed in the process. They now stimulate this differentiation without FBS or ‘gene editing’, but haven’t announced exactly what they use instead.
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Multus, specializing in animal-free serums, heaped on a few months back, when they launched an FBS-substitute partnership.
Still, one lab-grown meat founder thinks these serum-replacement approaches, largely centering on ‘recombinant proteins’, lack creativity. As reported by Sentient Media:
Omeat plans to extract proteins from the blood plasma of living cows on a continual basis, using the animals as a renewable source of [growth medium] from which the company can cultivate beef.
Even if there isn’t a large-scale vegan lab solution, yet, the options for meat-growing are expanding.
‘Ick-vesting
Setting aside morality of ingredients, lab-grown meat is still expensive to produce, and requires significant advancements in technique or scale in order to compete with artificially low meat prices in the US.
And even if lab-grown meats were priced the same as factory-farmed alternatives, not everyone is ready to dig their fork in.
The Chief Operating Officer of Upside Foods—the other US company to gain domestic approval last month—spoke with the Associated Press about these market hesitations:
Chen acknowledged that many consumers are skeptical, even squeamish, about the thought of eating chicken grown from cells.
“We call it the ‘ick factor,’” she said.
The sentiment was echoed in a recent poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Half of U.S. adults said that they are unlikely to try meat grown using cells from animals. When asked to choose from a list of reasons for their reluctance, most who said they’d be unlikely to try it said “it just sounds weird.” About half said they don’t think it would be safe.
While the thought of eating anything grown in a lab may send a shiver down one’s spine, the imagined ‘ick factor of lab-grown meat hardly compares to real ickiness of factory-farmed meat (99% of US meat).
Loaded up with hormones and antibiotics, genetically engineered to debilitatingly unnatural shapes, and packed unimaginably close together, factory-farmed animals live in devastating filth and a state of constant vulnerability, until their bitter ends. Lab-grown meat, by contrast, doesn’t use antibiotics, and is free from enteric pathogens.
Just as with factory-farmed meat, consumers may forget about the ‘ick factor when sinking their teeth into a delicious bite of indistinguishably meaty, lab-grown meat.
Finding a non-FBS growth medium presents a major hurdle to scaling up lab-grown meat, and driving down costs for consumers, animals, and earth’s living systems. In the meantime, the milestones in regulatory approval and growth in new techniques keep investors betting past the ‘ick factor.