Berlin-based Bluu Biosciences has raised a multi-million euros series A financing to push forward cell-based fish.
Bluu Biosciences has raised €7m in a series A financing round. According to an arcticle, published on tech crunch, the list of investors include Manta Ray Ventures, Norrsken VC, Be8, CPT Capital and Lever VC. The Berlin-based company enters the stage of international companies such als Shiok Meats or BluNalu dedicated to develop cell-based fish alternatives.Just like alternative meat, experts see a big market potential for sustainable fish. Already, concerns over the effects of overfishing and industrial fish farming are mounting as demand for fish increases. For this reason, in the past years the number of cellular meat companies are now also focusing on fish, but there are not many. “There is a lot of talent in Europe and very little companies built in this space. If you compare it to the mammalian space there are a lot fewer companies,” said Simon Fabich, co-founder and managing director of Bluu. At Berlin-based Bluu, the focus is on salmon, trout and carp. Other companies are tackling tuna, salmon and shrimp, but Bluu sees carp as an especially attractive target, given its popularity in China, one of the world’s most populous countries. The company co-founder Sebastian Rakers brings in a lot of competence in the field.
He is a marine and cell biologist by training and has worked for the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Marine Biotechnology and Cell Technology (EMB) in Lübeck, conducting research on the viability of using fish cells as a component for viral production for the pharmaceutical industry, among others. During his research Rakers cultivated 80 different cell cultures for more than 20 different species of fish. What’s more, he was able to make these cell lines immortal. Based on this experience, Bluu Biosciences will be able to easier scale up manufacturing cell lines for alternative fish. “It’s such a strong competitive advantage,” said Fabich. “If you have normal cells that are not immortalized you can only proliferate 20 to 25 times and then you need to start again from another biopsy. With immortalized cells you can grow up to 100,000 times and we can double it every day.”
With this technology in hand, Rakers said he was thinking about what could come next in his own career and met up with Gary Lin, an impact investor and the founder of Purple Orange Ventures. Lin connected Rakers with investor and entrepreneur Fabich and both decided to commercialize Rakers’ research as Bluu. Even though there are several companies that have a head start in the market, Rakers said that there are certain advantages to coming in late. “Five years ago there was hardly any company looking into media development, hardly any companies focused on bioreactor technologies at a very large scale and there was no company looking for scaffolding alternatives for cell-based meat,” he said. Now there are many of them. Based on this development the company feels comfortable to pick up speed as well and aims at having a prototype product out by the end of 2022. The company is also pushing for regulation, which both Fabich and Rakers said were one of the last remaining obstacles to commercialization. Ultimately, the company has its eye firmly on the Asian market. “That’s the one that moves the needle,” in terms of sustainability, Fabich said. “We can have the biggest impact if we change production behavior there.”