Forget lab-grown meat. A US company backed by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka Shing and some of Silicon Valley's leading investment funds is developing lab-grown cow skin in a bid to disrupt the $100bn global leather industry.

Andras Forgacs, founder and chief executive of the US-based company, Modern Meadow, said the new technology would allow real leather to be produced at scale in a factory without having to raise or slaughter livestock.

Instead, the vegan-friendly leather will be fermented using a bioengineered form of yeast which will be brewed to produce bovine collagen, a protein found in the connective tissues of cows which is the basic biological building block of leather.

“The opportunity is vast because the world of materials is vast,” he told the Telegraph in Helsinki this month.

“Cows don’t come in the shape of a sofa or a handbag… So we can create a lot of efficiencies.”

He added: “This is not about creating artificial leather. It’s about taking what we love about natural materials and being able to enhance them.”

Since 2014, Modern Meadow has already secured about $54m in funding from some of the world’s biggest investors.

They include Iconiq Capital, a San Francisco-based private wealth manager whose clients include Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.