Do you eat Lab-grown meat? Would you give the same answer if someone asked you to use a beauty product that contains lab-grown collagen as an ingredient?
Cellular agriculture – the process of growing an agricultural product from cell cultures – has gained momentum over the past few years. Earlier this year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a plan by Upside Foods and Good Meat to sell lab-grown chicken through restaurants. Both companies, as well as several other cellular agriculture startups, have raised significant amounts of investment dollars.
The rise of cellular agriculture has not been linear and easy, of course, and not everyone is in on the craze. Italy, for example, is working to ban these things completely, and Various opinion polls It has produced mixed results regarding whether people will actually eat lab-grown meat.
But not everyone is using technology to create another meat alternative.
Stephanie Michelsen first realized the potential of cellular agriculture when she was working in the alternative protein sector. When I started thinking about it more, I realized there might be an opportunity that was being overlooked: animal proteins like gelatin and collagen have use cases that go beyond food.
“I started thinking about the obstacles to the transition to an animal-free future. If all animal culture disappeared tomorrow, what would be lost? What don’t we have a solution for?” “For me, the byproducts were just in these animals,” Michelsen said. This is how I arrived at collagen.
Implantable collagen is the foundation of her startup Jellatech, which was founded in 2020 and recently secured a $3.5 million funding round led by By VC Founderswith participation from Milano Investment Partners and Joyful VC, among others.
Jellatech stands out in the increasingly crowded field of cellular agriculture because it is tapping into a bigger opportunity than some of its seafood- and meat-focused peers.