Finless Foods closes $3.5M Seed Round anchored by Draper Associates
Those who know me know that I’m a utilitarian, and have a hard time getting around to tasks that don’t feel essential to pushing myself and Finless forward (…as many have already pointed out, newsletters are a good example, sorry everybody), and so writing this of course went by the wayside in the pursuit of moving into our new facility, prototyping, speaking, and building relationships with people around the world. That said I think this has gone on long enough and so here is the inevitable announcement.
A few months ago, Finless Foods raised a $3.5M round led by Draper Associates. We are immensely pleased by this partnership, and welcome everybody on the Draper team in to our mission to transform the way seafood is made. As a year-old company founded by two biochemists with a history of environmental activism and agricultural research, we are honored to gain the support from large names like Draper and more to bring resources to bear on this important technology at such an early stage. (For more on the Draper side of things, please read Billy Draper’s statement here)
We’ve already come a long way since we left IndieBio, where we created the world’s first clean fish cakes to ever be eaten (video here). We’ve already dramatically lowered cost and secured precious cellular material that will push us into rapid commercialization within years, not decades. We’ve also finished the move in to our new facility in Emeryville California that is providing us a solid and state-of-the-art base, giving us the room to grow in the coming years.
After Finless Foods left the IndieBio accelerator where we got our start, we secured investment from Hatch, the world’s first aquaculture accelerator. Hatch, based in Bergen (Norway), is partnered with industry giants such as Cargill, DNB, and AquaSpark and has relations to Marine Harvest, Grieg Seafood, Leøry, Merck, and Salmobreed among others. Finless has also received investment from Hi-Food, an Italian company founded by food scientists focused on the creation of healthy and sustainable ingredients. Their food science expertise has proven itself time and time again invaluable to our process and thinking about the food we’re helping bring to the people.
This round will bring us to the end of our initial R&D phase, meaning we’ll have the tools necessary to move into production pending the closing of a Series A. The opportunity this money gives us to perfect our science and create delicious, safe, and healthy food is genuinely exciting to our entire team.
Other investors in the round include Softmatter VC in New York, Starlight in Florida, The U-Start Club in Italy, Blue Horizon in Switzerland, Hemisphere Ventures in Seattle, Babel Ventures in San Francisco, Yakumi Investment in Tokyo, Olive Tree Capital in San Francisco, Breakoff Capital in Hong Kong, and Harrison Blue Ventures in New York.
We’re genuinely thrilled to have these people on board, as this is a totally new field that will require vast expertise in a wide variety of topics. I firmly believe that we are building the right team to take this task on and create something new that can solve large-scale problems worldwide, which is why we’re all in this in the first place.
- CEO & Co-Founder Mike Selden
