• Mermade Seafood, a Jerusalem-based cultivated seafood startup, raised USD 3.3 million in a seed funding round, with participation from OurCrowd, Fall Line Capital, and Sake Bosch along with a Dutch investment company among others.

• The funding is expected to help the company hire stem cell and algae researchers for the development of its cultivated scallop product, which it expects to reach laboratory-scale production by 2023.

• The company has developed a novel patent-pending circular method of production, “cytoponics,” which recycles bio-waste from cell-cultured meat production–made of water, ammonia, and carbon dioxide–to feed algae, which in turn is used as a growth medium. Mermade Seafood claims this method will result in products that are cost-effective with a high nutritional value. It further stated that this method can be used for an array of cell-based applications apart from cultivated meat, such as pharmaceuticals.

• Mermade Seafood, founded in 2021, is a company focused on cultured seafood production with a focus on scallops as its initial product. The company is aiming to provide cultivated scallops at a much lower price point than what is available in the market, thereby increasing demand. 

<ul><li> AnalystQuickTake: Cell-cultured meat is heavily reliant on expensive growth media, making cell-cultured products much more expensive than conventional meat. Discovering a growth medium substitute to fetal bovine serum (FBS) is a key challenge for commercialization due to the high price tag it carries. Future Meat Technologies is another company that developed a technology to remove waste material from media, allowing the company to recycle parts of the media with the aim of reducing feed media input by almost 50%. In addition, it replaced FBS with molecules derived from Chinese hamster ovaries (CHO). Companies like Meatable are developing cell-cultured meat using pluripotent stem cells, which have the ability to convert to muscle or fat cells without FBS or CHO, in order to reduce production costs.</ul>