MULTUS BIOTECHNOLOGY LTD has raised £1.6M ($2.2M) as part of the London-based company’s latest fundraising. Investors include SOSV, Zero Carbon Capital, Marinya Capital, and angels Sake Bosch and Alvaro Martinez Barrio together with an equity-free grant of £106k from the UK Research and Innovation Council.

Founded in 2019 and having graduated from SOSV’s IndieBio programme, Multus is developing the key ingredient to make cultivated meat affordable, scalable and profitable. The company designs next-generation replacements for animal serum-based growth media that maximises cell growth while reducing costs. This is only possible through their expansive library of ingredients used in combination with proprietary protein engineering technology.

This latest round of funding allows their team to bring the first product to market. As an enabling technology for the cultivated meat industry, Proliferum M™ will allow companies to grow cost-competitive cultivated meat products as a viable alternative to industrial farming.

According to the latest report by McKinsey & Co., cultivated meat is set to be a $25bn industry by 2030 with growth media central to making these products cost competitive and scalable. CE Delft’s recent techno-economic assessment and life-cycle assessment highlights the potential benefits of cultivated meat over conventional meat in the key areas of global warming, human toxicity, and land use, with cultivated meat being 3.5x more efficient than chicken at converting feed into meat. The scenario analysis identified the efficiency of growth media as a dominant driver of the environmental impact of cultivated meat, with very efficient growth media decreasing environmental impacts from baseline by ~12 to 21%. Through developing a replacement for expensive, animal-derived feed ingredients, Multus aims to use its technology to enable cultivated meat companies to make their products the sustainable and affordable choice, for everyone.

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