An online auction for the assets of San Leandro-based cultivated meat startup SCiFi Foods will be held on August 6-8.
According to auctioneer Silicon Valley Disposition, “The auction features extremely high-end and late-model (mostly 2022) R&D instruments. There’s an entire Sartorius Stedim pilot plant and a Sartorius Stedim AMBR250 24-way bioreactor system.”
Equipment up for sale includes “bioreactors, BioTek cytation hybrid microplate reader, Nova Biomedical bioprofile flex2 with osmometer osm20 cell culture analyzer, Cellaca MX cell counter, Bio-Rad cfx96 thermal cyclers, Branson 250 sonifier, Elga water purification systems, compressors, and much more.”
SCIFi Foods closed shop in June citing “challenges in the fundraising market.”
According to preliminary AgFunder data, investment in cultivated meat companies fell 37% to $52.8m in the first half of 2024 vs $83.3m in the first half of 2023, with the bulk of the capital going to Mosa Meat, which announced a $43 million raise in April. [Disclosure: AgFunderNews’ parent company is AgFunder.]
The three best-funded players in the space are UPSIDE Foods ($608 million), GOOD Meat ($270 million), and Believer Meats ($388 million). UPSIDE has hit pause on plans to build a large-scale facility in Chicago and is instead focusing on expanding its smaller ‘EPIC’ site in Emeryville, California, while GOOD Meat is “not attempting to raise money for a large-scale cultivated meat facility right now” and is instead focusing on process development and new cell lines.
However, Believer Meats, which is building what it claims is the “largest cultivated meat production facility in the world” in North Carolina, said it expected the facility to be “operational by the end of 2024” in a press release issued in late May, although it has not yet secured regulatory approvals to sell cultivated meat products in the US.
Read more about SCiFi Foods HERE.
