Finless Foods — Sustainable Seafood, Without the Catch.
I met Mike Selden in San Francisco about a year ago. He was developing a process to create seafood by growing healthy marine-animal cells in a sustainable, repeatable, and scalable way — “sustainable seafood, without the catch” as they cleverly phrase it on their website. The company was in its nascency, but his energy and enthusiasm for what he was building was inescapable.
Now, enthusiasm is important — critical even, but I had no real framework for the feasibility of this solution. Creating clean, healthy, edible fish without fishing seemed…well…hard. A few months later, in September, the Finless team proved it could be done with a taste test of carp-and-potato croquettes. Why croquette blends instead of the fish alone? Because, as Mike described to me, the product they had created was, at that point in time, both incredibly expensive to produce — so they thought a croquette might play better than a tiny dollop of fish, and incredibly fishy in taste — lacking the balanced texture and flavor we’ve grown accustomed to in fish.
The team has since proceeded through the IndieBio accelerator, honing their methods and building relationships with some large food-science corporations along the way, and earlier this year, when they decided to raise a larger seed round, we were thrilled about the opportunity to be involved. We are well aware that Finless will be in an R&D phase for awhile longer, both on scaling the fish medium and nailing the texture and taste of the product — but the progress they’ve made, the team they’ve built, and the problem they’re going after are all pointing in the right direction.
At Draper Associates, we try to look at the ‘what if it works’. In a given deal in early-stage venture capital, there is a 1x downside, and the potential for unlimited upside. The ‘what if it works’ for Finless is enormous: on the health front, they’re creating a cleaner fish product without the growing plastic and mercury content; on the access front, that fish’s availability won’t be restricted to coastal areas; and on the environment front, they have the potential to reduce or eliminate the worldwide problem of overfishing.
We’re excited to play some small part in the food-science movement, we’re thrilled to be involved with the Finless team, and we can’t wait to see what they come up with.
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