The company behind successful start-ups, such as AirBnb and Dropbox, are investing in clean meat start-ups too, with the intention to disrupt the meat and dairy industry.
Y Combinator assists companies when they are in their early stages, providing investment, business tools and access to an array of networks to help them become a successful business. They recently partnered with Good Food Institute (GFI) with a focus to help companies working on alternatives to traditional faring practices.
Y Combinator added ‘cellular agriculture and clean meat’ to its list of priorities to fund. Speaking to Fast Company, Gustaf Alstromer, a partner of Y Combinator, said: “The reason we did that is we actually believe that clean meat could replace nearly all animal meat at some point.
“YC got interested in it because of the innovation in this industry. We think that if it works, clean meat will revolutionize the entire meat industry, and we think that it will probably be entrepreneurs and startups that build the companies that produce meat.”
The Good Food Institute works with universities to recruit young entrepreneurs and scientists in the field of clean meat. It works with meat companies, such as Tyson, to convince them to invest in plant-based and clean meat start-ups and helps to find research into these areas of food technology.
GFI are a charity, and therefore the backing from Y Combinator is a donation rather than an investment that their usual business model is built on: investing in a start-up for a stake in the company.