Dutch cultivated meat pioneer Mosa Meat has raised €15 million ($17.6m) to develop its tech platform, just days after fellow startups Meatable and Believer Meats ceased operations citing an inability to raise new capital.
The round, which comes on the heels of a €40 million ($47 million) raise in early 2024, was backed by state-owned impact investors Invest-NL and LIOF, German meat producer and strategic partner PHW Group and Jitse Groen, the founder of Just Eat Takeaway.com.
To date, the company has raised about €150 million ($176 million), with other backers including Lowercarbon Capital, M Ventures, Nutreco, Mitsubishi, and Leonardo DiCaprio.
“When we introduced the first cultivated burger, it was a €250,000 proof of concept,” said CEO Maarten Bosch, who said Mosa Meat has regulatory dossiers under review in the UK, the EU, Switzerland and Singapore.
“Today, through fundamental scientific breakthroughs and scaling efficiencies, we are producing burgers at a price point ready for restaurant menus.”
Why it matters
Given the recent grim news, the fact that any company in this space has been able to raise fresh funds will be seen by some as a glimmer of hope that some investors at least believe the tech has legs, provided firms do not put the cart before the horse.
As in any emerging sector, said Victor Meijer, investment principal at Invest-NL, “Investing in cultivated meat is challenging and requires stamina. The company’s strong team, solid progress and continued support from existing shareholders give us confidence to continue our support in this next phase.”
The shake out currently taking place in the industry is “a natural phase of maturation, given the rapid influx of startups in recent years,” cofounder and CSO Mark Post, PhD, told AgFunderNews.
“Developing this technology requires patience, scientific rigor, and a long-term horizon. At Mosa Meat, we have found that investors support a rational, deep-biotech approach that prioritizes fundamentals over speed. We remain laser-focused on the unit economics of scaling up. While we have seen dramatic decreases in the cost of production over the last two years, we know that further reduction is required for cost-effective mass scale.”
He added: “We are confident those targets will be met, but we must reach them before scaling, not after.”
Asked about the role of public funding in cultivated meat development, CEO Maarten Bosch told AgFunderNews: “We believe government support is as important for this new technology to flourish as it was for other transformative technologies such as batteries, solar panels, and the internet, but also conventional food production, which is heavily supported by government subsidies.
“Our founders Mark [Post] and Peter [Verstrate] met during a government-supported research project and we have seen strong support in The Netherlands over the years. Ranging from our government-backed investors, to a National Growth Fund that enabled the spinning out Cultivate at Scale [facility in Maastricht], as well as creating a code of practice for pre-approval tastings together with the relevant Dutch ministries.”
He added: “We are of course sad to see peer companies struggle due to this challenging economic environment. But we have witnessed significant progress in 2025: within Mosa Meat, but also in the broader field, on culinary product performance, reduction of production costs and on regulatory developments. So, we remain quite optimistic about the prospects of bringing cultivated beef to consumers.”
What’s next?
Founded in 2016, Mosa Meat currently has bioreactors up to 1,000-L scale at its facility in Maastricht, Bosch told us.
“This enables a first market introduction at a selected set of restaurants. We can currently produce burgers with that setup at cost levels that are suitable for restaurant sales. [The] Cultivate at Scale [facility in Maastricht] has plans to further expand capacity as needed, likely adding 5,000-L vessels over time, which would enable further cost reduction. We will share more about the products as we get closer to market introduction.”
According to published literature (click here, here and here) Mosa Meat has been working with bovine satellite cells (adult muscle stem/progenitor cells) and fibro-adipogenic progenitors (FAPs), which are present in bovine muscle and behave like fat.
“We use fat and muscle precursor cells,” said Bosch. “In short, we have two separate processes for the two cell types. The approval we are awaiting in the EU, UK and Switzerland is for the fat cells, responsible for the beefy and animalic taste we have been consistently confirming in tastings.
“Crucially, FAPs reach a mature level of adipogenic differentiation in three-dimensional, edible hydrogels,” explains the authors of one recent paper co-authored by Dr. Post. “The resultant tissue accurately mimics traditional beef fat in terms of lipid profile and taste, and FAPs thus represent a promising candidate cell type for the production of cultured fat.”
