#186 - Cai Linton (Multus Biotech): Enabling technologies for lab-grown meat

In this week’s episode we chat with Cai Linton, co-founder of Multus Biotechnology, a UK-based startup building an all-in-one solution for the cellular agriculture industry. At Kfund we’ve been looking at foodtech for quite a while and building our internal thesis around the topic, with a special focus on enabling technologies applied to the food industry. Multus is a perfect fit. The costliness of growing cells has become a bottleneck for companies looking to innovate healthcare and food industries. The status-quo for growing these cells is to use animal-based growth media, which is expensive, unethical and also produces results of varied quality. Multus plans to tackle these problems by engineering a new growth medium that is both inexpensive and animal-free. And this podKast episode is about exactly that and the following topics: Cai’s professional career and what led him to build Multus Cai walks us through how the cultivation of lab grown meat: how does it work? how does the supply chain looks like? Why is the lab grown meat important and relevant for climate change? The two biggest bottlenecks in meat cultivation is time to market and price parity. Why is this the case? FBS has been around for many years, specially in the pharma industry, in the development of vaccines and biomedical research, yet it remains an extremely expensive, unsustainable and unethical medium for growth, so why have the incentives not been in place to find alternative solutions like Multus before? What are some of the efforts that have been done globally to address time to market and cost parity? Today what are current meat replacement methods out there, how do they differ from one another and where does Multus sit in this landscape? How does Cai think traditional meat companies perceive lab grown meat? From Cai’s perspective as a founder, what are his views on lab grown meat exit scenarios?