Agronomics Limited Announces Mosa Meat Raises EUR 40 Million in New Financing

DOUGLAS, ISLE OF MAN / ACCESSWIRE / April 17, 2024 / Agronomics (LSE:ANIC), a leading listed company in cellular agriculture, is pleased to announce that its portfolio company Mosa Meat B.V. ("Mosa Meat"), a leader in cultivated beef production, has successfully raised EUR 40 million in new capital to help finance further scaling up of production processes and prepare its products for market entry.

The oversubscribed round was led by Lowercarbon Capital LLC and M Ventures, part of Merck Group. New investors include government-backed partners including Invest-NL (the Dutch state-owned impact investor), InvestEU (the European Commission strategic development program), Limburg Institute for Development and Financing ("LIOF", the Limburg regional development fund), and the Limburg Energy Fund ("LEF", the regional fund supporting greenhouse gas emissions reduction).

Additional new partners with a background in the conventional meat sector also participated in the round, including the PHW Group, one of Europe's largest poultry producers, alongside XO Ventures.

Mosa Meat is a global food technology company pioneering a cleaner, ethically sustainable way of producing real beef. The founders, which produced the world's first cultivated beef hamburger in 2013, created Mosa Meat in 2016 to help scale up the production of cultivated meat for commercial consumption. In November 2023, they opened their fourth facility, making Mosa Meat the world's largest cultured meat centre and increasing its production capacity for cow-free burgers. They are currently preparing the first formal tastings of cultivated beef in The Netherlands for later this year.

Agronomics invested EUR 3.5 million into Mosa Meat's Series B round in September 2020, a position which is currently carried at £3.1 million (equivalent to EUR 3.7 million), subject to audit. This new financing has no impact on Agronomics' carrying value and the Company continues to hold an equity ownership of ~1.68%, on a fully diluted basis.

Maarten Bosch, CEO of Mosa Meat said:

"The overall macroeconomic landscape has been rough in the last two years, which has culled the herd of companies and forced us to be even more strategic and focused on achieving our mission. As such, we are humbled and honoured to welcome both public parties and conventional meat producers to join this critical journey. In an environment that is increasingly polarised, we choose to connect and collaborate, working towards a future where cultivated beef is a real choice for consumers and a complementary solution in the toolbox to combat the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity. Rethinking how we produce great food for a growing planet without destroying it is quite a daunting task and will take many people and organisations to pull in the same direction."