In a further blow to the nascent cultivated meat sector, Dutch cultivated meat startup Meatable is winding down operations after failing to secure funding, key shareholder Agronomics revealed this morning.
A key shareholder in Meatable alongside BlueYard Capital, DSM Venturing (now dsm-firmenich Ventures), Humboldt, Thai food giant Betagro and the Dutch fund Invest-NL, Agronomics had invested £7.9 million ($10.6 million) in Meatable, which had a book value of £11.9 million ($15.9 million) prior to the wind-down, representing just over 8% of Agronomics’ net asset value as of Sept 25.
The news comes days after Israel- and US-based startup Believer Meats ceased operations, prompting a flurry of commentary on social media about the viability of the sector, which has seen funding almost dry up over the past couple of years.
Suzi Gerber, executive director at the Association for Meat Poultry and Seafood Innovation (AMPS), which represents key players in the space, told AgFunderNews that AMPS hoped Meatable’s “contributions and vision continue to advance the field, even if in a different form.”
She added: “In a maturing sector, collaboration and consolidation are common features of progress, including the reallocation of talent, intellectual property, and assets into contexts able to carry them forward to commercialization.
“We are now entering the second phase of this industry, characterized by CAPEX-light, OPEX-nimble, long-term deployment strategies rather than breakthrough disruption. It is always unfortunate when the early innovators are not able to continue, but at the same time, the people, capabilities, and technologies developed often persist through new teams, partnerships, and applications, continuing to influence both the science and the broader landscape.”
Meanwhile, “outcomes for any one company should not be interpreted as a measure of the strength of the sector overall,” she insisted.
‘Companies that will win will have the best science’
Founded in 2018 by biologist Daan Luining, stem cell biologist Dr. Mark Kotter and McKinsey exec Krijn de Nood, Meatable claimed to have slashed production times for cultivated pork by dramatically speeding up the process by which its stem cells differentiate into fat and muscle.
As to whether differentiation is mission-critical, industry experts we have spoken to have not offered a clear answer, with some claiming it is what distinguishes a slurry of cells from “real meat” and others saying it’s an expensive luxury for companies looking to get a minimum viable product onto the market.
“Some players use undifferentiated cells, but if you don’t differentiate you can’t really recreate the experience of meat,” Luining told us in 2024. “Don’t get me wrong; we’re not making a steak [with fully-fledged muscle tissue] but we are making high quality fat and muscle. There are unique characteristics of the compounds that [fully differentiated] cells make that are delicious and nutritious. But you have to be able to do it with the efficiency and speed that makes it cost-effective.”
However, the fact that its process may have been considered by regulators to create GMOs, which would slow down the approval process in some markets, may have made its path forward more challenging.
Speaking to us in August after acquiring some IP from UK-based Uncommon Bio, which has also developed tech claimed to speed up the process by which stem cells differentiate into fat and muscle, director of comms Bo de Koning told us that a key part of the appeal was the fact that Uncommon’s approach is not considered by regulators to create GMOs.
“For us, the major attraction is a diversification across possible GMO and non-GMO product lines, where in the past we only had the GMO option.”
Meat made to order
Armed with over $105 million in funding, Meatable brought in meat industry exec Jeff Tripician as CEO in June 2024, who told us that the “companies that will win will have the best science, and they will partner with established [meat] companies to build large-scale plants.”
Meatable, he said, would be “a raw material supplier, as unsexy as that is, a raw material supplier or vendor to a meat company. Meat companies will have this be part of their capex plan for decades, most likely incremental standalone, cultivated meat plants.
“Cultivated meat and seafood can be made to order, it doesn’t have the issues with land, water, disease… avian flu, swine flu, animal welfare, antibiotics,” added Tripician. “It can address the issues that consumers care about and have already shown they will pay extra for, so if we can do it efficiently, why wouldn’t people buy it?”
Just over a year later, Tripician left the firm to return to the [regular] meat industry, leaving CTO Aris de Rijke at the helm.
While Meatable outlined plans to team up with a newly formed company called TruMeat to build a pilot cultivated meat facility in Singapore, it was unable to secure funding to get the project off the ground.
Funding has dried up
On paper, cultivated meat looks like a no-brainer. Unlike plant- or fungi-based options, it has the allure of “real” meat without the ethical and environmental baggage, coupled with the promise of food security, which is moving up the agenda in many countries due to supply chain disruptions.
In practice, however, there’s no playbook for biomanufacturing meat at scale, funding has begun to dry up, and the political environment has become increasingly hostile in key markets such as the US and parts of Europe.
AgFunder data show that funding peaked at $989 million in 2021, dipped to $807 million in 2022, $177 million in 2023, $55 million in 2024 (excluding an undisclosed sum raised by Hoxton Farms), and $65 million in 2025.
GOOD Meat, the first company to commercialize cultivated meat, has not yet landed on a model for profitable production at large scale, while UPSIDE Foods has paused plans to build a large-scale facility in Glenview, Illinois, in favor of expanding its smaller “EPIC” site in Emeryville, California given the evolving funding environment.
Further reading:
What went wrong at Believer Meats? Sources point to risk, scale, and timing
Exclusive: Cultivated meat co Believer Meats sued by design build firm for $34m in unpaid bills
