Meatly raises £10.4m to build Europe’s largest cultivated meat facility

Cultivated meat company Meatly has secured £10.4m in Series A funding to build Europe’s largest cultivated meat production facility, signalling a major step forward for the commercialisation of cultivated protein.

The London-based company, which became Europe’s first business to sell cultivated meat, will use the investment to develop a 20,000-litre bioreactor facility in London.

Fit-out will begin immediately, with product launches expected in 2027.

This investment marks a powerful endorsement – not just of Meatly, but of Britain’s foodtech and biotech sectors.

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.”

 

Owen Ensor, CEO of Meatly

Focus on commercial scale-up

Meatly plans to ramp up production of cultivated chicken for the UK pet food market after launching the world’s first cultivated pet food product in 2025, following regulatory approval a year earlier.

The investment comes as the cultivated meat sector faces growing pressure to prove it can scale production commercially while reducing costs. Meatly claims to have made significant progress on both fronts. In 2024, the company cut the cost of its chemically defined protein-free medium to £0.22 per litre, before reducing bioreactor costs by around tenfold in 2025 through in-house engineering.

The funding round brings Meatly’s total investment to £17.4m and adds three new investors: Oyster Bay Venture Capital, Clean Growth Fund and JamJar Investments. Existing investors including Agronomics and Pets at Home also participated in the raise.

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.

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.”

 

Jim Mellon, Executive Chairman at Agronomics and Chairman and Founding Investor at Meatly