Avant Meats cell-cultured fish maw tartare © Avant Meats
According to regulatory filings with Singapore’s Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA), ParticleX, Lever VC, Artesian, Thia Ventures, CPT Capital and the Good Protein Fund invested in the cell-based seafood firm. The lead investor in this round, S2G Ventures, has invested $5 million in Avant Meats. S2G is typically known for investing in companies that develop innovative technologies for the food, agriculture, ocean and clean energy sectors.
ACRA filings only reflect the equity funding received so far in the round. The overall funding round could be larger and potentially include other components such as debt.
Avant Meats last fundraising round was in December 2020, when it closed $3.1 million in seed money. This supported the company’s research and development efforts as it worked to launch its cell-based fish products on the Chinese market.
Avant Meats is China’s first meat cultivation biotechnology firm and according to DealStreetAsia, is the only company in Asia to develop cultivated meat for food, skin care and cosmetics using its proprietary technology that produces zero-residue protein directly from fish cells. Avant Meats says that the patent-pending technology is a scalable, safe, efficient and reliable biological process.
The firm has secured $10.8 million in Series A funding © Avant Meats
As Avant Meats progresses, it hopes to produce fully traceable and sustainable cultivated proteins in a biosecure environment that will be suitable for consumption, skincare and other functional applications. To achieve these objectives, the company partnered with the Bioprocessing Technology Institute within Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). The partnership will help scale up Avant’s process for generating food-grade and cost-effective cell-cultured fish.
According to DealStreetAsia, the companies will develop and optimise solutions to scale the production of cultivated fish cells. They will identify key factors that impact the growth of cell-based fish cells and develop the processes and designs to improve production economics and scale up.
