Israeli start-up aims to produce cell-cultured scallops

Seafood grown in a lab, not the sea, could be coming to a supermarket near you in the foreseeable future.

That’s the claim made by Israeli tech business Mermade, which has just raised US$3.3m (£2.8m) in a seed funding round. The company says it has developed a technology to make cell-cultured seafood affordable, and plans to start with scallops.

Mermade was founded in July 2021 by Daniel Einhorn (CEO), Dr. Rotem Kadir (CTO) and Dr. Tomer Halevy (COO). Investors in the seed round include the investment platform OurCrowd, Israel’s most active venture firm; Fall Line, an American VC fund specializing in AgTech; prominent Dutch investor Sake Bosch; and others.

The company intends to develop a product and reach laboratory-scale production by 2023. Mermade will use the funds to employ more stem cell and algae researchers, accelerating the company towards this goal. Scallop is just the first product the company will develop out of a diverse portfolio of seafood that will gradually arrive on the market.

Today, between 55% and 90% of the marginal cost of cultivated cell manufacturing is due to the growth media, making cultivated meat hard to scale. Mermade plans to introduce a “circular” method of production by recycling the growth media using micro-algae and then upcycling those algae back into useful media components.

This technology is not limited to seafood, the company says, and could be used in a wide variety of cell-based applications, including pharmaceuticals.  Moreover, using algae as part of the seafood growth process provides better nutritional value and taste to the product.

This cellular interpretation of traditional aquaponics was termed by the company “Cytoponics”. Mermade has filed several patent applications related to this circular production method.

Daniel Einhorn, Co-Founder and CEO of Mermade Seafoods said: “We decided to focus on scallop as our first product, since it’s a popular dish all over the world, but one that suffers from high prices and shortages due to serious supply chain problems. It’s easier to produce in comparison with other more complex meat products, and we can bring it to market relatively quickly. The global scallop market is worth $8bn a year [£6.8bn], over $600m [£511m] of which is in the US alone. Our production method will make it possible to reduce the cost of each scallop dish and to expand the market’s volume by orders of magnitude because supply will finally adjust itself to the high demand.”

According to Einhorn: “In the next few years, consumers around the world will be able to buy cultivated scallops (Coquilles Saint Jacques) made by Mermade in a supermarket or restaurant, at an affordable price and with the same quality and taste as the original food. Using Cytoponics as our production platform, we could also produce a variety of other cultivated seafood products such as calamari, shrimp, crab meat and more. The opportunity in this field along with our unique technologies will establish us as market leaders in the coming decade.”

Eric O’Brien, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Fall Line Capital added, “Mermade is not only pioneering new technologies to improve sustainability in aquaculture, but we believe they are building a circular technology platform that could unlock scalable commercial production for the entire cultivated meat industry.”

Mermade founders from left: Dr. Tomer Halevy, Daniel Einhorn and Dr. Rotem Kadir.