Biotech startup Tiamat Sciences announced that it is developing a new cellular agriculture growth medium which would significantly reduce the cost of producing cultivated meat and allow for faster progression to large-scale manufacturing. Traditional growth factors are expensive, but new plant-based biomolecules can take their place.
The company recently secured $3 million in a seed funding round led by Silicon Valley-based True Ventures. Therefore, Tiamat Sciences is positioned to take advantage of its unique plant molecular farming system. The funding will be used to offer a viable alternative to costly growth reagents, speeding up the development of the cellular meat industry.
By combining biotechnology, vertical farming, and computational development programming, Tiamat is able to manipulate and design specific, animal-free proteins. Currently, cultivated meat costs about $50 per pound. With focussed investment into new growth mediums, this could be significantly driven down to $3 per pound by 2030.
Co-Founder of True Ventures Phil Black, said: “The cell meat industry is here to stay and now people are interested in making it more profitable for themselves and making more of it. Limited factors exist, and Taimat’s solution will be a game-changer.”
Tiamat’s CEO France-Emmanuelle Adil added: “The growth factors used in media are expensive right now. We can reduce costs drastically and reach price parity with meat.” According to Adil, the current growth factor used in cultured meat costs $2 million per gram to produce. She believes that her team will be able to drive that figure down significantly by 2025, but only if other startups commit to similar endeavours. Though Adil cannot reveal any of Tiamat’s potential customers yet, she is planning a sample product roll-out in early 2022 with a view to securing new partnerships.
The company has raised $3.4 million in total, all of which is being invested in production facilities and technology development. Additionally, Tiamat is making headway to becoming a carbon-neutral operation, which remains a guiding motivation during construction, partially relocating from Belgium to North Carolina’s biotech ‘Triangle’ back in May.
“Growth factors are transferable to other industries because the processes are similar. We will be working on expansion for the end of 2022. We will scale very fast with a number of plants and then 100,000 plants. We are in discussion with companies to help us scale big, but progressively.”
