Meatly raises £10.4M to build Europe's largest cultivated meat facility
What's the deal? London-based cultivated meat startup Meatly has raised £10.4M ($14M) in Series A funding to build what it says will be Europe's largest cultivated meat production facility. The round was led by three new European VCs: Oyster Bay Venture CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Clean Growth FundDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and JamJar Investments.
The money will fund a 20,000-litre bioreactor facility in London, with fit-out work starting immediately and product launches expected in 2027. Meatly has now raised £17.4M ($23.5M) in total, including earlier seed funding from Agronomics and Pets at HomeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.
The company's target market is pet food — not human consumption. It became Europe's first company authorised to sell cultivated meat after receiving UK regulatory clearance for cultivated pet food in 2024, and began selling what it called the world's first cultivated pet food product in 2025.
Why now? Meatly says it has spent four years reducing costs and building a technical foundation for scale. CEO Owen Ensor framed the raise as a turning point: "Now we have our own industry-leading technology, and we are ready to scale."
The round is also one of the largest recent infrastructure-focused investments in Europe's cultivated meat sector — a signal of renewed investor appetite after a period of scepticism about the industry's economics.
What could go wrong? The cultivated meat sector faces a brutal scaling challenge. Many companies have struggled to move beyond pilot-scale production and prove they can manufacture products consistently and affordably. Culture media costs, cell density, and bioreactor design remain stubborn bottlenecks.
Ensor has acknowledged the difficulty himself: "There's no room for shortcuts in the cultivated meat industry as getting the science right is absolutely critical."
The signal: Meatly's route to market is sharpened by its relationship with early backer Pets at HomeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, the UK's largest pet supplies retailer with more than 370 stores — giving it a built-in distribution channel that most cultivated meat startups lack. With Clean Growth FundDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → now on the cap table alongside pet-industry incumbents, the investor mix suggests a bet on near-term commercial traction rather than speculative deep-tech timelines.
Read more: proteinproductiontechnology.com
