The race to commercialize the best-tasting alternatives to meat is starting to sizzle: A mushroom-based startup headquartered in Boulder, Colorado called Meati just raised $50 million.
Meati uses the roots of mushrooms to produce whole cuts like steak ready to slice on top of a salad or chicken breast breaded and fried as a sandwich. Much of the funds from its recent series B will go towards completing construction on an 80,000 square-foot production plant, which will soon pump out millions of pounds of Meati in time for a commercial launch in 2022.
“Ultimately, we’re introducing a whole new type of food, a whole new type of protein,” CEO and cofounder Tyler Huggins grins over Zoom from his office in Boulder. “I want to do this the right way. I want to bring people to the proverbial meat table and have a conversation.”
The round was led by a new investor, BOND, which is the venture capital firm founded by longtime Midas List honoree Mary Meeker. Her firm is the first female-founded and female-led in venture to cross the billion-dollar threshold. Funds in the series B also came from Acre Venture Partners, Prelude Ventures, Congruent Ventures and Tao Capital.
Meati CEO and cofounder Tyler Huggins started out as a field biologist but went back to school for a PhD in environmental engineering and discovered the power of fungi.
Meati Foods
An impressive roster of food industry insiders also double as investors and advisors. The list includes former Patagonia CEO Rose Marcario, the former CEO of Annie’s Organic John Foraker (who now runs the brand Once Upon a Farm),former CEO of Whole Foods Market Walter Robb, two of the three Sweetgreen cofounder, Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman, former White House Senior Policy Advisor for Nutrition and partner at Acre Sam Kass, and co-owner of Blue Hill Restaurants and Founder of Almanac Investments David Barber.
To produce its protein, Meati uses fermentation. Investing in brands that use fermentation has become a hot area that investors are flooding to. At least $435 million of the $2 billion raised in 2020 across alternative protein companies came from startups leveraging fermentation in their research and development, according to the Good Food Institute. There’s now at least 20 startups in the U.S. working to commercialize such technology.
Investors eyeing fungi-based products believe their bets will have a better chance at success in the future because there’s less ingredients and processing, and often better nutrition than soy or pea protein based alternatives. But there’s a lot that can still go wrong in the push towards commercialization, and three-year-old Meati has some well-funded and well-researched competitors. Of course, all of them are trying to take a bite out of America’s $1 trillion meat industry.
A key competitor is Atlast Food Co., an upstate New York based spinoff from a decade-long pioneer of research into mushroom roots called mycelium raised a $40 million series B in April. It was right around the same time that Meati also raised $18 million in debt financing, after securing a $28 million series A in the fall of 2020 led by Acre.
CEO Tyler Huggins (right) and CTO Justin Whiteley met at the University of Colorado Boulder and founded Meati in 2019.
Meati Foods
Meati was founded in 2019 by Huggins and CTO Justin Whiteley, after they met at the University of Colorado Boulder while working towards their own PhDs. Whiteley specialized in materials, while Huggins was a former field biologist who discovered the power of mycelium.
Huggins had grown up in Montana on his dad’s bison ranch where animals grazed on grass day in and out, and regularly ate game. “I did learn from a very, very early stage of life that meat doesn’t come from the grocery store. There’s several steps of hard work before that,” says Huggins. That mindset eventually is what helped open his eyes to the possibilities of what mycelium could provide as a food source. “I was looking at nature as a toolbox,” he explains.
Meati, the only public benefit corporation in the alternative protein industry, claims its mycelium is “extremely resource efficient” and that, at scale, Meati’s plant will produce the equivalent of 4,500 cows every 24 hours. That rate, Huggins says, will help the company reach price parity with conventional meat from industrial agriculture.
Says board member Rose Marcario, who launched Patagonia Provisions during her seven years running Patagonia: “They have a commitment to be uncompromising about the processes that they use and the inputs that they use. What real responsible companies do is look deeply into their supply chains and continuously improve them. It gives them an edge.”