Finless Foods’s CEO and co-founder Mike Selden earlier announced that Finless Foods raised $3.5 million in seed funding. The round of funding was led by Draper Associates and featured many notable investors, including Softmatter VC, Blue Horizon, and Babel Ventures.

Finless Foods is a startup that uses cellular agriculture to grow cultured fish meat. Cellular agriculture (‘cell ag’) is the process of growing animal products, like fish meat, from cell cultures and eliminates the need to use animals like fish for meat. Finless Foods is the first cell ag startup focusing on growing fish meat from cells, and their work offers a sustainable solution to meet global fish demand without further depleting global fish populations.

Finless Foods celebrated its one-year anniversary in March, and the startup has had an incredible start to the year. In April, Finless Foods co-founders Mike Selden and Brian Wyrwas were named in Inc. Magazine’s 30-under-30 list for 2018. This list commemorates innovative founders under the age of 30, and it’s great to see that their work makes the list as the first cell ag startup producing cultured fish meat.

Finless Foods is initially focusing on producing cultured Bluefin tuna

Even though Finless Foods was the first cultured fish meat startup, they are no longer the only player in the field. In March, a new startup called Wild Type announced that they also raised $3.5 million in seed funding to make cultured salmon meat. Along with that, BlueNalu announced earlier this month that they also raised seed funding to produce cultured seafood as the first cellular aquaculture company.

With a new facility based in Emeryville, California, Finless Foods plans to use the seed funding to take them to the end of their initial research and development phase. This means that they expect to move into production of cultured fish meat when they close their Series A funding! Finless Foods is initially focusing on producing cultured Bluefin tuna meat and plans to release a limited amount of it by the end of 2019. Without requiring fish.