Less than a year after emerging from stealth with an “elegant solution” to scaling cultivated meat by harvesting nutrients from “healthy cows” for its cell culture media, California-based Omeat is operating with a skeleton crew following a turbulent few months during which the founder stepped down as CEO after being accused of creating a hostile working environment.
“Omeat isn’t ready to scale. The science isn’t quite ready, and it has effectively gone back into R&D mode, which makes sense.”
“The [larger] bioreactors are just sitting there all shiny and pretty [and unused]. I think Omeat’s ultimate sin was spending all that money transitioning into the pilot plant before we were doing everything properly at lab scale. There was this pressure to scale, scale, scale when we were not ready.”
Source: Staff cuts & leadership shake-up at cultivated meat startup Omeat