Japan agtech player raises $7m Series A

Domestic VCs Real Tech Fund and Hiroshima Venture Partners also participated, as did US-based investors AgFunder and VU Venture Partners. There were joined by NH Foods, a Japanese meat and dairy conglomerate also known as Nippon Ham, and Naruhisa Nakagawa, founder and CEO of Singapore-based fund manager Caygan Capital, who invested in his own right.

IntegriCulture was founded in 2015 by CEO Yuki Hanyu with a view to fill expected supply shortfalls in a range of food and non-food agricultural products through cell-based production. The company's core technology, known as CulNet, allows for large-scale production of cell-based meat and leather among other products.

CulNet is said to achieve this more cost-effectively than existing cell-culturing methods by emulating natural animal endocrine systems. In theory, the process could be applied to any type of animal cell, opening up a wide range of potential applications in food, medical, biochemical and materials products.

"I don't think anyone else on the planet has given more thought to how to solve the problems of cultivated meat than Yuki," Rob Leclerc, a founding partner at AgFunder, said in a statement. "Bringing down the cost of cell culture media is the central challenge for all cultivated meat companies and IntegriCulture has the most elegant solution we've seen to solve this problem."

The fresh capital will be used for R&D, production, marketing, branding and staffing as the company addresses a number of near-term operational targets. IntegriCulture plans to launch a food-grade CulNet product for enterprise clients and build a cell-based foie gras production site within the year.

The foie gras project and a direct-to-consumer cosmetics business are hoped to be in operation by 2021. This would be followed by systems for processed meat in 2023 and steak in 2025. Timelines for leather, fur, and medical products have not been set. The company has acknowledged regulation and public acceptance as significant obstacles but hopes to offset these factors in part by meeting the UN's sustainable development goals.

IntegriCulture has raised JPY1.1 billion to date, including a JPY300 million round in 2018. That investment included Beyond Next, Real Tech Fund, Leave-a-Nest Capital, as well as agtech developer A-Five, cosmetics maker MTG, and biotechnology company Euglena.

Previous activity in this space includes an early-stage round for Singapore's TurtleTree Labs, which claims to have created the first-ever cell-based milk, and an $80 million Series B for Nature's Fynd, a US-based company targeting Asia with technology that makes edible proteins from non-animal and non-plant sources. 

Meanwhile, VisVires New Protein, a Singapore-based VC specializing in food technology, has led a $12 million round for Aleph Farms, an Israeli culture meats developer that has identified Asia as its key growth market due to longstanding concerns by regional meat industry regulators around food-borne illnesses and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Last year, 1955 Capital, a cross-border PE firm that invests in US and European technologies with application potential in Asia, led a $33 million Series A round for edible protein developer Sustainable Bioproducts. The company has developed a fermentation technology that uses bacteria and algae found in volcanic springs to grow protein with great nutritional value and minimal impact on the environment.

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• Topics
• North Asia
• Cleantech
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Japan
• Agriculture