Gourmey bags US$48 million to keep working on lab-grown foie gras

France's cultured meat start-up Gourmey, has announced it has raised a Series A funding round led by Earlybird Venture Capital. In total, the company has picked up US$48 million. The company has reportedly been working on lab-grown foie gras.

“Most of the financing is equity but also includes a minor portion of non-dilutive funding, specifically from public institutions like Bpifrance,” commented Nicolas Morin-Forest, Co-founder & CEO told Tech Crunch. Gourmey isn’t disclosing the valuation of the company.

Other investors in the round include Keen Venture Partners, Omnes Capital, Discovery, Thia Ventures, Instacart CEO Fidji Simo and some existing investors, such as Heartcore Capital, Point Nine Capital, Air Street Capital, Partech and Beyond Investing.

Gourmey matures stem cells in bioreactors with the right nutrients at the right temperature so that it becomes synthetic foie gras or — as they say — slaughter-free foie gras. With this latest funding round, the start-up wants to move from R&D to commercialization. But you won’t find Gourmey’s product in a supermarket just yet.

“Our cultivated foie gras is market-ready and has already convinced several French and international Michelin-starred chefs, restaurants and high-quality meat distributors,” Morin-Forest said in the Tech Crunch article.

In order to fulfill orders at scale, the company is going to create a 46,000ft2 innovation and manufacturing hub, which should be up and running within the next 18-24 months.

There will be 120 engineers, food experts and operators working there, producing tens of thousands of pounds of cultivated meats.

“In parallel, we are working hand in hand with the food safety authorities and agencies to obtain regulatory approval and bring our product to market in the safest conditions in several geographies like Singapore, the USA, the UK and the EU,” Morin-Forest explained.

“We continue to work on expanding our portfolio of high-quality, sustainable meat products in poultry but also other species and we have several exciting announcements coming up,” Morin-Forest said.

Hannah Lester, Head of Regulatory at Gourmey, is one of numerous columnists writing in the launch edition of Protein Production Technology International, which is published on 26 October 2022.