BLUU Seafood Raises Funds to Bring Cultivated Fish to Market
Image courtesy of BLUU Seafood
BLUU Seafood announced that it's closing its Series A by raising €16 million. The German startup says it's secured the capital to advance the work on its technology and the market launch of first products.
The Series A funding was led by Sparkfood and LBBW VC. Further participants in the round were SeaX Ventures, Manta Ray Ventures, Norrsken VC, Delivery Hero, Innovationsstarter Fonds Hamburg GmbH and Dr. Oetker. In total, BLUU Seafood has raised more than €23 million since its founding in 2020.
The company says it will use the fresh money to drive regulatory approval of its first products, expanding research work and initiating pilot production. The focus will be on hybrid products such as fish balls and fish fingers made from cultivated fish cells blended with plant-based proteins, which BLUU first presented in 2022. The startup aims for market entry in Singapore by 2024, where the sale of cultivated chicken has already been approved by regulators in 2020.
In the U.S., cultivated meat and fish are also about to be launched following recent USDA and FDA approvals for cultivated protein startups GOOD Meat and UPSIDE Foods. With the final approval of the U.S. Department of Agriculture granted, the sale is officially allowed. BLUU Seafood, too, has initiated the approval process with the FDA. Europe will follow next.
The company is also currently preparing to open its pilot production plant with construction work to be completed by fall this year. With this plant, BLUU Seafood will leave lab scale and reach another milestone by scaling up production into larger fermenters of up to 500 liters.
According to Dr. Sebastian Rakers, co-founder and CEO of BLUU Seafood, "Our successful Series-A demonstrates the enormous potential that lies in cultivated fish as a platform technology for sustainable animal protein and underlines the strong scientific development that we at BLUU Seafood have delivered so far. Together with our strong, international investor base, we can start the next stage of development and bring our first products to market."
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