Making Meat, Clearing Carbon: Our Investment in Vow

Imagine sitting down at a restaurant and the menu offers selections that include alternative proteins. However, after taking a closer look, you realize that these aren’t your traditional plant-based meat alternatives for chicken, beef, or pork.

Rather, they’re entirely unique meats with tastes, flavors and textures completely new to you. Perhaps this selection includes products that enhance your skin or nails through the enrichment of animal collagen. Or something impossibly decadent that combines mouth-watering duck fat with the irresistible sizzle of a pork loin. Intrigued, you order and come to realize that these options aren’t plant based-alternative meats at all, but meat grown from biological cells in a cultivator.

While this might seem like a far-off future, cell-cultured protein is progressing quickly. As the world population rises and the demand for meat protein along with it, the need for sustainable, cost-effective alternatives will only grow. These challenges require a better recipe for global meat production, which is why I am excited to announce Toyota Ventures’ investment in Vow.

On a mission to make sustainable food both irresistible and available to billions, Vow is crafting meat from exotic animal cells. While no easy task, the company is working to maximize protein for a hungry world, while minimizing the meat industry’s environmental footprint — which accounts for nearly 60% of annual greenhouse gases (GHG) from food production. Vow is drastically reducing land-use constraints of domesticated meat production — and thus GHG impact — by growing various protein options from cells in as little as six weeks.

Founded in 2019 and based in Sydney, Australia, Vow is co-founded by George Peppou (CEO) and Tim Noakesmith (chief product officer). Together, the pair bring a unique blend of backgrounds. George is an inventor of more than 30 patents and the founder of an agrifood accelerator. Tim has deep expertise in human-centered design from his time at a hearing device company, Cochlear, where he optimized user experience for hearing implants. This expertise and background, catalyzed by their shared passion for the future of food, has led the founders to rethink the way billions of us eat.

Vow’s go-to-market purposefully circumvents replicating low cost, commodity meats such as chicken, beef, pork, and lamb. Instead it’s creating cultivated proteins that fall outside of the 0.02% of animal species that are typically found on our menus. By not focusing on traditional meat options, Vow is able to create products more efficiently, and eventually at higher volumes, than traditional industrial animal agriculture — thus advancing faster towards premium retail and food service markets.

Technically, what differentiates Vow is its library of cell lines from exotic and domestic species. The company screens for prime cell samples through an automated process, looking for keys to new meat flavors, textures and nutrition profiles that have been hidden — until now. Optimal cells are stored in Vow’s cell library where the company can combine these building blocks into potentially millions of combinations to find the next great meat — like small-batch whiskeys or artisanal granolas.

Image courtesy of Vow Food

With the goal of feeding billions, Vow is working to bring its cultured meat to the masses at an affordable price. By making early investments in custom software, the team at Vow is automating its manufacturing process to rapidly iterate cell engineering, select the right cells, develop culture media, and create optimal processing conditions. At scale, the team believes its approach will help make prices for crafted meat lower than prices for other meat, while dramatically lowering GHGs caused from meat production.

Vow is transforming the future of food with sustainable crafted meats, and we’re proud to join the company’s Series A along with Cavallo, Blackbird Ventures, Square Peg Capital, Grok Ventures, Peakbridge, Pavilion Capital Partners, NGS Super, HostPlus and Tenacious Ventures. Special thanks to our senior associate Erin Keller for driving this deal for Toyota Ventures. Visit the Vow’s website and the Toyota Ventures portfolio page to learn more.