Cultivated meat pioneer Meatly, Europe’s first company to sell cultivated meat, has raised £10.4 million in Series A funding to build Europe’s largest cultivated meat facility, marking a major step in the sector’s shift from R&D to industrial-scale production.
Three leading European VC funds have joined existing investors to support the company’s next phase of growth: Oyster Bay Venture Capital, a food and agtech investor backed by institutional capital; Clean Growth Fund, a specialist climate tech VC platform; and JamJar Investments, an early-stage consumer investor.
The raise brings significant new external capital into the cultivated meat sector and follows £7 million in seed funding from founding investor Agronomics and Pets at Home, taking Meatly’s total funding to date to £17.4 million.
“This investment marks a powerful endorsement — not just of Meatly, but of Britain’s foodtech and biotech sectors,” said Meatly CEO Owen Ensor. “Meatly has one focus — to make commercially viable cultivated meat a reality. Over the last four years, Meatly’s pioneering team has systematically focused on reducing key costs and building the strongest possible technical foundation for growth. Now we have our own industry-leading technology, and we are ready to scale. This step will allow us to prove commercial viability at scale and start to continually produce Meatly Chicken for the UK pet food market.”
Since launching in 2022, Meatly says it has addressed key technical cost barriers facing the cultivated meat industry, accelerating the path to scalable and affordable production. In 2024, the company reduced the cost of its chemically defined protein-free medium to £0.22/l, which it says is an industry-leading benchmark, before announcing a roughly 10-fold reduction in bioreactor costs in 2025. Following regulatory authorisation in 2024, Meatly launched the world’s first cultivated pet food product in 2025.
The new funding will support the development of a 20,000-litre bioreactor facility in London, set to become the largest cultivated meat facility of its kind in Europe. Fit-out will begin immediately, with product launches expected from 2027.
“Rethinking how we produce protein is an essential part of tackling the climate crisis,” said Connor Duffy, investment manager at Clean Growth Fund. “We’ve invested in Meatly because they are showing it’s possible to produce real meat cost-competitively and with a fraction of the environmental impact. The team is focused on building a commercially viable path to scale, which will ultimately determine whether solutions like this can deliver meaningful change. We’re delighted to be backing Meatly as they set out to build Europe’s largest cultivated meat production facility.”
“Meatly is not just building a new product — it’s laying the foundations for an entirely new protein category,” said Elise Schumacher, investor at Oyster Bay Venture Capital. “Cultivated meat is emerging as one of the most sustainable and ethical ways to produce meat today. From advancing the science to early retail sales for pets, Meatly has shown a clear ability to move from concept to real-world application, with the foundations to scale across Europe and globally. Having built and grown some of the most successful food businesses ourselves, we know what it takes — and this is exactly the kind of company we like to back. Owen, Helder, and the Meatly team are doing the right things early and are primed to make a meaningful difference to both the planet and in transforming the food ecosystem for the better.”
“The market opportunity for sustainable and high-quality protein is enormous, but success in this category ultimately comes down to one thing: bringing down the cost of production,” said Jim Mellon, executive chairman at Agronomics and chairman and founding investor at Meatly. “The team at Meatly has consistently cracked this challenge, reducing costs by building their own bioreactors, developing their own culture medium, and staying focused on what it takes to scale.
“That combination of technical rigour and financial discipline is exactly what wins in this market, and that’s why we founded the company and continue to support them. This approach has earned Meatly fresh capital from new investors as the company scales production, aiming to build a more resilient, secure and sustainable protein supply chain across the UK and Europe.”
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