The team of scientists headed by Post and Verstrate developed the world's first cultured meat hamburger in 2013, which cost €250,000 (US$330,000 The production process took three laboratory technicians three months to grow the 20,000 individual muscle fibers that made up the burger. In February 2017, the company set itself the goal to reduce the production costs to 60 euros per kilogram by 2020. In July 2018, Mosa Meat announced that it had raised a €7.5 million Series A funding round. The round was led by M Ventures and
Bell Food Group. In February 2020, the startup estimated it could enter the market in 2022. In May 2020, Mosa Meat had begun installing its pilot plant in Maastricht. In 2020, Mosa Meat announced an 88 times cost reduction of their medium (the broth that feeds the cells) and in 2021, Mosa Meat announced a 65 times cost reduction of their fat medium, making animal fat that is 98% cheaper than their previous method. In September 2020, the company obtained €45.4 million (55 million US dollars) from various investors, and in December 2020, it attracted another 16.5 million euros (20 million US dollars). Investors included Blue Horizon Ventures, the Bell Food Group, and
Mitsubishi. Mosa Meat said it would spend the money on expanding its pilot plant in Maastricht and hiring more personnel. In January 2021, Mosa Meat indicated it would initiate the regulatory approval procedure for its product with the
European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) during that year. In February 2021, Mosa Meat closed its Series B funding round at $85 million. The round included Jitse Groen from Just Eat Takeaway. By March 2021, Mosa Meat had secured over 70 million euros in funding from various investors including
Nutreco and
Just Eat Takeaway CEO
Jitse Groen. In September 2021, actor and environmentalist
Leonardo DiCaprio announced that he had funded Mosa Meat and
Aleph Farms for undisclosed amounts of money, stating: 'One of the most impactful ways to combat the climate crisis is to transform our food system. Mosa Meat and Aleph Farms offer new ways to satisfy the world's demand for beef, while solving some of the most pressing issues of current industrial beef production.' In September 2021 Leonardo DiCaprio joined Mosa Meat as an investor and an advisor. Originally, the start-up worked with a 100-millilitre tank. In January 2022, Mosa Meat published a peer-reviewed paper on how to achieve muscle differentiation in cultured meat without the use of fetal bovine serum (FBS) and without genetically modifying the cells. In May 2023, the new production hall at the
Randwyck-Zuid business park in Maastricht was opened by Limburg's governor
Emile Roemer and Maastricht's mayor
Annemarie Penn-te Strake; top chef was presented as a member of the development team. The new production facility reportedly had a capacity of several tens of thousands of cultured meat burgers per year, scalable to hundreds of thousands. Production time had been reduced to 4–6 weeks: muscle cells matured within a week, while fat cells took longer. In January 2025, a consortium of parties including
NIZO food research and Mosa Meat announced to build two new pilot plants to develop
cultured meat, with financial support from the
Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security and Nature, the Perspective Fund Gelderland and the National Growth Fund. NIZO would set up a new Biotechnology Fermentation Factory (BFF) at its campus in Ede, which would focus on scaling up precision fermentation of animal proteins, in order to make cheese or milk without using cattle. == Product ==