Meatly raises £10 million to build Europe’s largest cultivated meat plant

Meatly has raised £10.4 million to build what it says will be Europe’s largest cultivated meat facility, a 20,000-litre bioreactor site in London. The headline number sounds bold, but the scale question is sharper: can that money carry a cultivated meat company from technical proof to repeatable manufacturing, and can it do it fast enough to matter?

The answer, for now, runs through pet food. Meatly’s total funding now stands at about £17.4 million, including its earlier £7 million seed round backed by Agronomics and Pets at Home. The Series A also drew in Oyster Bay Venture Capital, Clean Growth Fund and JamJar Investments, a mix that suggests investors are still willing to back a narrow, manufacturing-led route even as broader alternative-protein fundraising remains difficult.

Fit-out on the London plant is expected to begin immediately, and Meatly says the site should support continuous production of cultivated chicken for the UK pet food market, with product releases planned for 2027. That timeline matters. A 20,000-litre bioreactor facility is not just a bigger pilot line; it is the first serious test of whether the company can run consistent batches, keep quality stable and drive costs down without sacrificing yield. In cultivated meat, those are the hurdles that separate promising demos from something that can actually be built around.

Meatly has been laying groundwork for that jump. The company, founded in 2022 by chief executive Owen Ensor and chief scientific officer Dr. Helder Cruz, received UK regulatory clearance in 2024 for cultivated meat in pet food. In 2025, it launched what it described as the world’s first cultivated pet food product in a limited retail run at Pets at Home in Brentford, London, with THE PACK. That made Meatly the first cultivated meat company in Europe to sell commercially, and it gave the business a real commercial loop, not just a regulatory one.

The company has also leaned hard into cost reductions. It said in 2024 that it had cut the price of its chemically defined protein-free medium to £0.22 per litre, and later said it had reduced bioreactor costs by roughly 10x in 2025. Those numbers help explain why investors were willing to fund scale-up now. Clean Growth Fund said it was backing Meatly’s next stage of commercial growth, while Oyster Bay’s Elise Schumacher said the company was laying the foundations for an entirely new protein category.

The broader sector still looks unforgiving. The Good Food Institute’s 2026 State of the Industry report says private funding alone is not enough to fully finance first-of-a-kind cultivated meat facilities, and the number of cultivated meat companies identified in 2025 fell to 140 from 155 a year earlier. Against that backdrop, Meatly’s raise is less about hype than about proving that an infrastructure-first strategy can survive long enough to become a real manufacturing business.