Brief: Eat Just nets $97m funding for cultivated meat unit, adds agrifood veterans to leadership

• GOOD Meat, the cell-cultured meat business of US alt-protein startup Eat Just, has secured $97 million in funding as a continuation of the $170 million investment it announced in May, taking the round to a total of $267 million.
• New and existing investors participated in this latest tranche, including UBS O’Connor, Graphene Ventures, K3 Ventures, and Resilience Reserve – a VC fund launched by TED curator Chris Anderson and writer and tech entrepreneur Rob Reid.
• GOOD Meat has also appointed two senior leaders with distinguished histories in the agrifood sector: ex-US agriculture secretary Dan Glickman, who is joining the business’s advisory board; and former DuPont executive vice president Jim Borel, who’s joining its board of directors.

Why it matters:

Glickman served as US Secretary of Agriculture between March 1995 and January 2001, and has worked extensively with organizations targeting issues such as hunger and sustainable farming. Borel worked at DuPont for four decades, during which he headed the company’s Crop Protection and Nutrition & Health businesses.

The new tranche of funding and the addition of Borel and Glickman are the latest in a string of apparent coups for Eat Just.

Last month, the San Francisco-based company announced plans to build a $200 million GOOD Meat production facility in Qatar. The Middle Eastern country is expected to clear Eat Just’s cell-cultured chicken for domestic sale in the near future.

Singapore approved GOOD Meat chicken for general sale last December, making it the first country to grant regulatory clearance for a cell-cultured meat product.