Bigger fish to fry: announcing Wild Type’s Series A
Today, we’re delighted to share that our portfolio company Wild Type has raised a $12.5M Series A round led by CRV. Spark, Root Ventures, and other existing investors doubled down, and Maven Ventures also joined as a new investor in the round.
We’re excited to welcome CRV to the Wild Type board of directors. In addition to their impressive food + technology portfolio (DoorDash, Pared), CRV brings deep expertise in biotechnology to the board (Freenome, Recursion Pharmaceuticals). On a personal note, I’ve known George Zachary, Wild Type’s new board member from CRV, since I joined StartX in 2012. George was one of StartX’s earliest supporters, and I’ve hoped for a long time to find an opportunity to co-invest with him. I look forward to working with George, Dylan, Saar, and the rest of the CRV team.
It’s fun to reflect on how far Wild Type has come in just a year and a half since Spark led their seed round. The team has grown from 2 to 15 people, bringing together experience in tissue engineering, cell biology, and media development. The company has been primarily focused on developing product and bringing down production costs, where they’ve made tremendous progress. The Wild Type team recently hosted tastings of their delicious salmon with partner chefs. You can read more about Wild Type and cultured fish in the New York Times, and Bloomberg recently covered their product debut in Portland (more notes and photos here).
We think the future is bright for the cultured meat industry, and there is a lot of exciting work ahead to scale this to the mass market. We look forward to sharing more exciting news soon around Wild Type’s product development and industry partnerships.
