[Disclosure: AgFunderNews’ parent company AgFunder is an investor in IntegriCulture]
IntegriCulture, a Japanese startup building the “picks and shovels” for cellular ag, has turned a profit in the year to Sept 2025 from high-value ingredients for the cosmetics market and CRO services to a range of clients.
While it has continued to work with a range of partners to build more cost-effective tools to scale cultivated meat, Tokyo-based IntegriCulture has also developed products and services for other industries to sustain itself, notably conditioned serum for high-end beauty products.
“Startup activity in cell ag isn’t big in Japan yet,” cofounder and CEO Yuki Hanyu tells AgFunderNews. “So we’re financing ourselves from two fronts: revenue from non-food applications—mainly cosmetics—and supplies and CRO services for both startups and non-food sector players.”
But when it comes to cultivated meat, Hanyu says progress will hinge on a slow and steady, collaborative approach focused on building cost-efficient tools before scaling.
IntegriCulture is working on multiple fronts to make this happen, spanning cell culture media, scaffolds, and low-cost hardware, positioning itself as a full-stack infrastructure provider for cellular agriculture, he explains.
“IntegriCulture is a supplier-CRO [Contract Research Organization] that is evolving into a CRDMO [Contract Research, Development & Manufacturing Organization]. We support all players in cellular agriculture—small and big—with materials, equipment and know-how. We have officially settled at a positive net profit of JPY40 million ($255k) for the year October 2024 to September 2025.
“We are expecting solid growth for the ongoing FY25 (Oct 2025-Sept 2026) and all business segments have positive unit economics.”
Scale-up or scale-out engineering?
When it comes to bioprocess development and scaling, Hanyu says IntegriCulture’s strategy is to stay small until something proves worthy of scaling. “As long as cellular agriculture remains capital intensive, it will be very difficult to take off.”
He draws a parallel with the power sector. Traditional nuclear plants rely on proven technology but face massive upfront costs, delays, and budget overruns. By contrast, small modular reactors — and especially highly modular solar PV systems — are attracting investment through scalable, distributed deployment.
“Under this strategy, we are entirely skipping large stir tank bioreactors [which are widely used in biopharma]. Our effort is on [more compact] cell-ag grade packed beds and other adherent designs [whereby cells are attached to a surface rather than floating in suspension and media flows through the bed].”
IntegriCulture is pursuing both scale-up and scale-out approaches, he adds. Scale-up work is largely funded through Japan’s SBIR program, while scale-out is being developed with Japanese rubber and synthetic resin provider Sumitomo Riko, which created the Oxy-thru Cultivator — a low-cost bioreactor requiring no oxygen infusion.
Across both efforts, rapid hardware prototyping is critical, says Hanyu. “As the whole industry progresses cell line availability is expanding and media optimization is becoming more routine. However, scale-up or scale-out engineering remains an issue. Our engineering solution will feature CulNet Consortium [a collaboration with materials suppliers and engineering companies to advance cell ag].”
The CulNet system for DIY cell culture media
On the media side, IntegriCulture’s core innovation is the CulNet system.
Rather than producing and purifying dozens of individual media components via microbial fermentation, CulNet generates a complex, serum-like cocktail using interconnected chambers of organ cells that naturally secrete growth factors, proteins, and metabolites.
The cells are maintained using a low-cost basal medium. As fluid circulates between chambers, it becomes a conditioned supplement that can be continuously drawn off and used to support cultivated meat cells growing in an adjacent bioreactor.
This approach sidesteps costly downstream processing — often required when producing ingredients in microbes such as E. coli — while avoiding genetic modification and regulatory hurdles tied to recombinant proteins.
“CulNet technology continuously generates cell-cultured serum that can supply the product bioreactor where meat, liver or whatever target cells grow,” says Hanyu. “Since the use of CulNet eliminates the need to make the media composition a trade secret, we think it has the potential to win consumer trust.”
By using publicly known basal media while allowing companies to develop proprietary versions of cell-cultured serum, Hanyu believes the system could also lower barriers to entry.
The latest CulNet hardware is designed for commercial-scale production of conditioned medium and is larger and more automated than earlier versions, he adds. “It will be used as a positive control, and future development will focus on making the system smaller, denser, and simpler.”
Elsewhere, IntegriCulture is working with sake breweries — including Tsunan Sake Brewery — to explore micro-brewery style production hubs for cellular agriculture using sake byproducts.
‘Cell-Ag Cosmetics’
On the cosmetics front, IntegriCulture has developed Cellament, a nutrient-rich conditioned medium for high-end skincare products derived from early-stage avian cells.
Customers include Euglena, Epolar, Fabius, and Oppen Cosmetics, says Hanyu, who says emerging brands in K-beauty, are the most open to trying new things in this space.
“Our direct competitors include stem cell serum [conditioned media from human or plant stem cells] and animal placenta [extracts from pigs and other animals]. Compared to them, Cellament has comparable to superior skincare benefits, it’s safer as cell culture is pathogen-free, and priced competitively. Other benefits include supply stability and being less odorous, which makes Cellament easier to formulate.”
Despite its cell-cultured origins, the market still classifies such ingredients as animal-based, he adds. To reframe this, IntegriCulture is launching a Cell-Ag open brand to establish a new category.
“With our new initiative, the Cell-Ag open brand, we are aiming to establish ‘Cell-Ag Cosmetics’ as a category on its own, alongside other categories such as ‘animal-based’, ‘plant-based’, and ‘bio-pharma’. We are aiming to print the Cell-Ag logo on products that use one of our or our partners’ cell-cultured products to build market recognition of this category.”
‘The regulatory and political environment in Japan is mixed’
On the regulatory front, IntegriCulture has been working with JACA (Japan Association for Cellular Agriculture) to engage with regulators on rulemaking around cultivated meat, says Hanyy.
While the government had been expected to unveil a regulatory framework and guidelines for cultivated meat in March 2026, “There is some delay,” he said.
That said, foodtech and biomanufacturing are among the 17 strategic focus areas of the administration, alongside AI, space, and fusion power, he says.
“Although there are signs of political headwinds from lower ranked yet still powerful politicians, we have been avoiding politicization by describing ourselves as a biomanufacturer rather than a disruptive entrant to agriculture.
“In this field, the Japan Bioindustry Association has very strong lobbying power while being supportive of cellular agriculture.”
IntegriCulture products and services include:
Materials:
- IMEM – food-grade basal culture medium
- IMEM 2.0 – lower-cost formulation replacing select amino acids with yeast extracts (with JT/Tablemark)
- Egg-yolk-based FBS alternative – food-grade serum replacement for avian cells
- Food-grade cell culture consumables – adhesion coatings, cell banking solutions, and tissue dissociation agents (enzymes)
- Food-grade 3D scaffolds – for structured cell cultivation (with San-Ei-Gen FFI)
- Food-grade DMEM/F-12 medium – mammalian basal medium (with Nacalai Tesque)
- Iron uptake enhancer – improves aroma development in cultured cells (with Daiwa Can)
- Contamination-resistant media – designed for more robust large-scale culture (with Nichirei)
- Bovine myoblast cell lines – domestically sourced muscle cells from Organoid Farm
- Cell-cultured cosmetic ingredients – including Cellament
Equipment
- Oxy-thru Cultivator – oxygen-permeable, low-cost “squishy” bioreactor (with Sumitomo Riko)
- Desktop CulNet – cell-cultured serum production unit
- Packed-bed bioreactor (8 kg/month scale) – high-density culture with optimized oxygen control (with Hamano Products)
Services
- CulNet Pipeline CRO – R&D services for corporate partners
- Regulatory dossier review – for cell-cultured food companies
- Commercialization support – sales and distribution for cell-cultured cosmetic ingredients
