With other cultivated meat companies are collapsing, this one turned a profit | E2317

Let me drink a hot cup of tea. Shou! That didn't get picked up on the mic, did it? How's it going, Shou? You okay? Okay, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups in Japan. It's great, great to be back in my favorite city in all the world after my hometown of New York, my new hometown of Austin, that's Tokyo. Man, I love coming here. It's always so inspiring if you're a founder, if you're an investor and you haven't come to Japan, I highly recommend coming because you get to see people building and working with extreme pride and trying to get better at building their product or service every day of their life. It's called kaizen, is the art of constant improvement. The founders here in our second cohort of Founder University have been incredible. I was telling my team, the first cohort, we had so many great companies, but very raw. We were just getting started. And the second cohort, we saw a lot more companies that were ready to go global and that were, uh, had their company formation in the United States. So I think we're actually going to find some really great investments or candidates to come to our accelerator. If you want to find out about this Founder University program, we run it, uh, twice a year in Tokyo, twice a year in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and then twice a year in the United States. Founder.University is the webpage where you can see all 3 programs. The sun never sets on Founder University, and you don't even need to be incorporated. It could be you and 2 of your friends. You've built a project, you've got a prototype, you vibe coded something in Lovable or Claude Code or Groq or Perplexity Computer. We want to see it all. We love to work with founders in year zero. Uh, and I'm super excited today because we have Dr. Yuki Hanyu, and he is, uh, making cultivated meat. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Agree.com. Stop chasing invoices and automate your entire contract-to-cash stack.

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And Evry.

For all your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes, or other back office administration needs, visit every.io. And you're doing this in a different way than some of the cultured meats that we got to experience in America. I think Impossible Meat was one.

Uh, that is actually plant-based meat.

That's plant-based meat. Yeah. And then what was the next one that did chicken in America?

Uh, you mean Upside Foods?

Ah, yes.

Yeah, so there are like major companies in this field, is like Upside Foods, uh, Believer Meats, now defunct. But, uh, yeah, there's like Wild Type without the sale called Salmon.

Oh yes, what was this— what was the salmon one called?

Uh, Wild Type.

Well, yeah, so this has been around for a couple of years, and between the veggie, the fake chicken, fake fish, or mock I think is the term, um, it's gotten some fans in America, but it hasn't broken out yet. Why? Why hasn't it become very mainstream or has it?

I would say it's just the technology just not being there because the issue has always been the scaling and unit price. And also on the other side, that's on the other side, that will be the unit economics. That's not quite working yet.

Got it. So consumers have shown they want it, correct?

That's another because you, unless you have like sufficient quantity, you can't even like test for real to the consumers. And until then it will be all fantasy, to be honest.

There hasn't been enough scale for a large amount of customers to try it. So it's hard to understand demand. But I know from my friend group in San Francisco—

You can always ask. Yes. What consumers say and what they actually buy are always very different.

As Steve Jobs taught us, right? If he asked people, like what they wanted in an iPhone, it would not be beautiful, elegant. And I guess when it comes to food, if you were to ask a chef, if the chef were to ask you what you wanted, you would not be as delicious as omokase and or— yeah, correct?

Yeah, I go for like half price. Yeah, 30% off. Yeah, things like that.

Yeah, you want to really have— so your company Integri Integri Culture is working on a new way to create this food. Yes.

Yes. I would say protein.

Protein.

Whether to call our product as meat, that's a different story.

Got it. So for protein, and it's going to get a little graphic, so people be prepared if you, you know, we're talking about meat, but the ingredients and the process for creating mock meat previously This was using FBS in some cases?

Not really, because I would say FBS has been only for like laboratory-scale tests for regenerative medicine, cell culture, those things. Yes. And no one has actually made any commercial product with FBS. It's too expensive anyway.

Too expensive. And this is, of course, fetal bovine serum. That's the blood of unborn calves. And that's going to be used for organs in our body, maybe?

Maybe. But maybe even within that field, because such a quality control of FBS is really difficult. It's, yes, as you can imagine, how would you control the exact chemical composition of if it's made that kind of way? Yes. So the industry is going, I mean, medicine, pharma, biopharma, they're going to chemically defined ones, but very expensive. But it's It's like medicine anyway.

How were some of the other companies built the mock fish? I'm going to say mock fish and mock chicken. How did they make it taste? For me, I tasted the chicken and when they put it in sauce, I didn't taste very different. It tasted a little different, but I would say maybe it was 70% as good as real chicken to me. So what was the strategy they used for those specific verticals?

So obviously there's like different levels of, I would say, imitation level completeness for cell-cultured meat.

Cell-cultured meat.

Yeah. So if you are talking about 100% cell-cultured is a little bit hypothetical, but if that is, there is one that's kind of like synthetic diamond versus natural diamond. So it's basically talking about chemically the same thing. So that's why. So no wonder it tastes just like chicken.

Yes.

And but as of now, because of the state of the technology, it's not 100% imitation. Somewhere like, say, 70%, let's say.

What do you think it's at now? If you were to pick?

I would say, I think as of now, the 70 is like the maximum. And the reason is like right now, The cell-cultured meat, what they say, is made in like large stirred-tank bioreactors. And it is not making steak. It's making like slurry of cells.

Yes.

So you have to modify the slurry of cells to taste and look and taste like meat, but it's not quite the actual muscle tissue.

Got it. So right now, anybody who is a vegetarian turned off the podcast. That's okay. But for us who do like meat, it makes a slurry, which has the chemical composition, but now it doesn't have texture. So it doesn't have the fabric of meat that we like in a different cut of steak, different cut of chicken. You might like the chicken breast. I might like the chicken wing. The fibers and the structure is another piece of this. Some people were making a 3D-printed one or other techniques, but essentially current state of the art is making this in a big giant vat, with chemicals in order to get activated. And then you make the slurry and then you put it into chunks, I guess, or different formats.

Or chemicals. But exactly speaking, things like glucose, amino acids, which is like something we eat every day anyway.

Yes. Okay. So you have a different technique for this that you're pursuing. Tell us about it.

Yeah. So first of all, we are not aiming for meat. So we are making something that's trademarked as Kraft Essen. It sounds a little bit German, but it's just the Japanese people sometimes do that kind of thing. Just take any loanwords without even knowing the origin of the word. Yeah. Anyway.

Yeah, I have seen this. Sometimes you go to a cafe and it has a name that doesn't, for the American mind, make a lot of sense. But so tell us the German word you're using.

Yeah. Kraftessen. So basically Kraft food. Kraft food. Yeah. So basically, yeah. So that is basically cell-cultured duck liver cells. On cellular scaffold that actually looks like this.

Got it. So you're going to make duck liver like pâté?

Yeah. So it's actually the same cells as foie gras.

I love foie gras, but I feel guilty eating it.

Well, if you don't need to, if it's cell-cultured.

Yes, then I can eat foie gras every day.

Make sure you get enough vegetables as well.

Okay. Yes. So the first product you're making is going to be foie gras-ish.

If we are to— if we decide to go with that marketing strategy, but probably not.

Yeah, this is a very niche market. What is the technique you're using? And what's unique about your technique? Yeah.

So we have like a number of ways, but it traces back to our origin as a company. So originally we were not even a company or even a for-profit entity. We were more like an open-source cultured meat project. And with that DIY cell-cultured meat, making cell-cultured meat at home. Wow. The manual is here, by the way.

Oh, wow. So there are nerds— this is a technical word in America— there are nerds who want to do this at home as a hobby.

Yeah.

You're one of them.

Yeah.

You're the leader of the nerds?

Because I thought it was funny.

You thought it was funny to make meat at home?

Yeah. And I was basically distributing this manual in comic market.

So I would go to a comic store and you have the manual here. I'm holding it up. That has all the different tools you need to make your own meat at home.

Yes, I think some of the copies is still in Comic-Zin in Akihabara, still.

In Akihabara.

But also in London Science Museum.

In the London Science Museum, hilarious. How many years ago did you start this hobby? One of the most important things you can do as a busy founder is stay focused. You need to prioritize the decisions and workflows that are gonna move your company forward, not get lost in extraneous details and minutia. That's why The best decision you can make for your business is signing up with Every. Every is the all-in-one platform for incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, taxes, basically your entire back office. They're going to keep up with all the bookkeeping and paperwork so you can stay laser focused on your next big product or hiring features, customers, all that important stuff. If you're just getting started, they're gonna handle your Delaware C-Corp and getting yourself a registered agent, all with no legal fees and no delays. And Every has worked with over 1,000 startups already. That's the the kind of know-how and experience you can rely on. So head over to every.io and stop wasting time on stuff that isn't growing your company. That's every.io.

Uh, yeah, we started back in 2014. It's called Shoujin-Mit project. Still ongoing.

Okay, so 10 years ago, over 10 years ago, you start this open source project.

Yeah.

And how did that grow and who joined it?

Uh, yeah, all sorts of random people. Very random. Like high school students. And it was actually one of the high school students who did the DIY cell culture at home, and NHK came to film her growing cells in her room, and that got televised nationwide. And that sort of like funded the— funded, led to the seed funding of IntegriCulture, which is the direct spinoff from this Shouji Meat project, this DIY movement.

Got it.

Yeah.

So there's the DIY open source movement created your company. And how many people participated and actually made lab-grown meat at home over the last 10 years?

We haven't been even counting, actually, because we at least—

Hundreds? Thousands?

I would say, including those who did cell culture in schools after following the teacher's instructions and the teacher being trained by the Sojin Meat Project workshop. Yeah, I just don't know the number.

But maybe thousands even.

Potentially, I don't know. Potentially, yeah.

And so this technique, maybe you can show us some of the items you have here, but you've got a technique for doing this that's open source, and then you're going to go to market with it and you've raised a seed round.

Yeah. Yeah. So there were— but in the early phase, our worry was that so the cell culture meat could change the world, but it could also easily get into the GMO situation. Like being politicized, some like, basically if we just let capitalism take this, things go bad. So we need a clever way. So what we came up was to build an ecosystem. So Shoji Meat Project is open source. They do the more visionary stuff, like in this latest zine. Yeah. And then there's Cellular Agriculture Institute of Commons, nonprofit. They speak with the government regulators and maybe like established industry association. Then there's Integriculture company that builds the physical infrastructure. Yeah. And anyone who want to make, develop cell-cultured meat could use Integriculture company's capabilities, these like materials, equipment, and in the future production capability. Got it. Yeah.

So you're starting with the products you need to do it at home or business if you wanted to start a startup, and then eventually they'll be able to come and you might have a factory to do this on behalf of some other entrepreneurs?

Uh, yeah, if things, uh, things go well, what we are going to get is there's some hobbyists developing novel sort of cell-cultured meat. It could be like pork muscle, tuna fat, healthy meat, something like that. And they— if, if it's, if it's good and they want— he wants— he or she wants to expand, they could come to Integriculture Company to expand. So that way, how to make is open source, how to scale on the business.

Got it. Yeah, it's almost— I think they call it contract manufacturing. Yeah. Yeah. So you come up with your formula and then somebody else packages it for you and then there's distributors after that.

Yeah.

You mentioned two different meats together. This is, I think, something people don't understand. We're comparing it to things that we've put in our mouth before and flavors that we understand. So I understand tuna, chōtoro, otoro, and all these great flavors, seared toro. Then I also understand wagyu, Miyazaki beef, 5A5, New York strip, Australian beef, different profiles. But somebody could take these two concepts and build a flavor profile that somehow incorporates toro, yuzu flavor, and maybe steak, yeah?

So if it's cell-cultured, you can design that like meat, or better say food, in any way you want.

So has anybody done anything interesting that you've tasted?

Vile Foods, it's an Australian company. They did like quail meat.

Quail?

Yeah, quail.

Yes.

This little—

Little birds?

Yeah. Which has never been on the supermarket as a packaged quail that has the quail meat. Yes. Setting the initial product as quail meat, they cannot benchmark against any existing category. So they can put in whatever price they want. And also it shows the possibility of this technology.

Right.

So there have been some stunts like mammoth meat that are a bit more on the realistic side to when it comes to the actual— when they actually distribute stuff, they went with quail.

Well, and it's somewhat controversial. And so I'll be delicate. But in certain cultures, the idea of killing a cow, you know, in some countries is considered a sin and just terrible. Other cultures, you know, in Alaska, seal meat, dolphin meat, whale meat, like, is part of the culture history. And then in other cultures, it's looked at as a very big controversy between the West and in fact Japan and in Nordic countries. We don't, we consider, oh my God, how could you kill a whale? Or how could you kill a dolphin? It's very strange. First time I, one of the first times I came to Japan, I went to the Tsukiji fish market before it was popular. And I saw this beautiful meat in bricks and I said, oh, it must be this beautiful tuna. And then I got closer and closer and it was whale, beautiful cuts of whale. And I was like, whoa, I've never seen that before. So sometimes things that maybe are either extinct or maybe controversial. Yeah, you can't sell whale meat in America. So not allowed. Contraband. Just like in some countries now, in some places, foie gras is considered too cruel to create and they don't let people do it. So have people started to think about that? You know, dolphin meat, whale meat, etc. These are things that people are just not able to access, let's say.

Yeah. So those things are on the possibility as a niche market. So the market has to develop. It starts with some like stunt products. Yes. Then niche products, then something a bit more mainstream before going to the actual mainstream. Yeah. So the industry has to like take each steps to reach the mainstream.

What stage are we in now? Are we in the stunt phase?

Stunt phase. Got it.

Yeah. So are you able to buy many of these stunt meats in supermarkets now?

Well, right now in Japan, because the food regulation is not ready, Yet. So it's not there. In Singapore, some, yes, with Vow Foods and Parima, which is a French company that makes cell-cultured foie gras. They've got the clearance, regulatory clearance, but I don't think they have put it on the market yet.

Oh, you haven't tried it yet or have you tried it?

Vow Foods quail meat, yes.

How was it?

Well, I enjoyed it, although, like, because it's a stunt meat, would I eat it every day or Regularly? Regularly, probably not, but because it's expensive. Ah, partially.

What is it per pound versus real quail?

Yeah, I don't know the price of the real quail. Anyway, so that's the whole point. But anyway, it's much—

it's multiple times the cost of poultry or chicken.

And partially because it was in a fancy restaurant. Oh yeah. So it was a good experience. Yes.

It's also interesting. Maybe you wouldn't normally use a larger quantity or a different format, for example, to use 5A5 incredible Kobe beef or Wagyu Miyazaki beef in a hot dog or for like a bacon or some common meat or, you know, to make, you know, hash brown or like a corned beef hash, you would never use it. It's too high quality. You'd be offensive to use it. So you could have maybe more accessibility. You could have a hot dog that's a Wagyu hot dog. This might be the best idea ever. Maybe I should contract manufacture this.

Yeah, but actually, when it comes to those stunt products, it doesn't have to be like, it doesn't have to be just food that you are selling. It could be part of a bigger experience. Like, so for example, have you heard of a video game called Cyberpunk 2077?

Yeah, of course.

Yeah. So basically, if there's some sort of special event, of Cyberpunk 2077, and part of the event is the cell-cultured meat. So basically you're selling not just the cell-cultured stuff itself, but you're selling the whole experience.

Got it.

So that's the sort of approach we have to take for these like stunt markets.

When will the regulatory framework make it possible to put these in more supermarkets and more restaurants?

Yeah. So, well, you mean in Japan, right? Yeah. So that depends on what the Consumer Affairs Agency say, but they they've at least did the hearing session to consumer groups already. Okay. And so the industry, those industry association people says, well, end of this summer or maybe beginning of autumn. So it's like very close, I would, I hope. Yeah.

In America, and maybe you know about this more than I do, there were some places, Florida or Texas, that wanted to ban these things.

Yes. Yeah.

I don't know, those haven't passed or those are controversial, I think. Yeah.

Because it has become a part of a culture war in the US. Ah, yeah.

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Yeah.

As opposed to it might taste better or it might be more interesting or it might be more luxury product. It could be framed as those, but people are trying to protect the cattle industry maybe.

Well, to be honest, the— well, I talked about the scale earlier and the scale is so tiny. Yeah, that is— I think it's 0.001% or even less compared to the existing meat industry. So It's not even a dent in the industry, but it's just too woke.

How many cycles do we need to do, sprints, to get it to be the same price as the equivalent product today, do you think? So sprints or years, you know, how many, you know, revisions do you still need? You know, do you have to do maybe 10 revisions, 5 revisions every 6 months? And, you know, 2 or 3 years from now, it'll be same price for a steak.

Yeah.

Your chicken breast.

Yeah. Yeah. So actually what could happen is that because, because the existing meat price is also a moving target because of all the climate change and geopolitical this and that and yeah.

Yeah. So, well, let's assume meat prices, you know, continue to go up maybe 5% a year.

Yeah.

So it's, you know, going to double every 10 years, I think is what it's done previously. Yeah.

So the meat categories, like eel, foie gras, I think the price parity is close. And when it comes to like regular beef, if you're talking about wagyu beef, things like that, it also depends on texture. But I would say like 10 years or so. But it also depends on the branding, actually. Yeah, because it's actually paying for the brand rather than the meat itself when it comes to wagyu and those like expensive meats.

Let's go with chicken.

Yeah.

So chicken is a commodity.

Yeah.

You know, people make chicken salad, they make chicken breasts, they make chicken nuggets.

That's the hardest one. So it could be—

Why is it the hardest one?

Because it's cheap. So you have to make it cheap. You have to, you probably have to go with a large-scale factory or something. Yeah. Which even if the technology is ready, you know how many years it takes to build a nuclear power station?

Yeah.

Yeah. So you will be talking about that kind of things.

Like a decade.

Yeah.

Or two maybe.

And we don't have the technology yet.

So when do you as a startup, you've raised a seed round.

Yeah.

How do you stay in business long enough to, you know, get there? Because obviously you're enabling other people. So you're selling the tools. Yeah. And the system.

So by making ourselves a cell agriculture company rather than cell-cultured food or cell-cultured meat company.

Got it.

Yeah. So there's this kind of like nested fields of ideas. Cell-cultured meat is a future form of cell-cultured food. And outside the cell-cultured food, we have cell-cultured cosmetics, cell-cultured leather, maybe like— well, this is plastic, but anyway. And even outside that, we have regenerative medicine and other like biopharma stuff. So we are a cell agriculture company rather than cell-cultured food or even cell-cultured meat.

Got it. And leather could be really interesting. Yeah.

And beauty. Cell culture cosmetics. Yeah, that's one of the ways of keeping us alive.

Tell me about the cosmetics. Is it a better product, a cheaper product? Are you making things that can't be made today and you're going to have breakthrough products?

Yeah. So it also resonates with what we discussed a little bit earlier about this previously impossible sort of food. So when it comes to cell culture, we can make Uh, some of the— yeah, one of the most common, um, beauty ingredients like placenta in Japan and East Asia. Yeah, but that's, uh, that alone, like, safety is one, uh, ethical side is another. Um, but if it's cell culture, it basically solves all these problems. Yes. And another is that, like, um, becoming more important, but supply chain stability, this another. It is in competition to so-called stem cell serum, a lot imported from Korea.

Got it. So this is something for your face or something, or this ingredient would go into another product?

Or to our client's product.

Your client's product. Yeah.

And that one's more supply chain stable because we don't need to import from Korea. And the existing stem cell serum is human cells, but that one's like vaccine-grade eggs center cells, so safer.

Yes.

And also it's actually a little bit cheaper. Yeah.

So better supply chain, more ethical, less controversy. Safer. Safer. So many things to navigate.

Yeah. Just with this particular brand alone.

Right.

And we could develop all sorts of other products using different cells.

You can make something better. Yeah. Ah, fascinating.

Yeah.

And so how much money have you raised so far? Who's the investors? Is it venture capital yet or just crazy seed investors, crazy angel investors? Yeah.

So, so far our fund rates so far have been something like somewhere between $15 to $20 million USD, which is far less smaller compared to our like industry peers in the US or like in Europe.

Yeah, but it's still a big amount of money for Japan.

Yeah.

And You have how many years to figure all this out? 2 years to make it work?

Well, initially we like, we have been doing cosmetics from day one.

Oh, so you have revenue now?

Yeah.

Oh, amazing.

Yeah. So that's actually one of the reasons why a lot of our better funded peers are collapsing while like we're totally healthy. We actually turned profitable last year.

Oh, congratulations. It's fantastic because you picked a good beachhead market, you have a good first market ideal customer.

Yeah, yeah.

And then you wait for the other things to show up.

And also the contract manufacturing and building the tools, a little bit in the future, but yes, we already provide the tools.

But yes, yeah, and that business could be big too.

Yeah, uh, yeah, excellent.

So this is anything important lesson for a lot of founders. We talked earlier, like, sometimes you have a big vision. We have one founder here who wants to put robots and for elder care, you know, and the robots aren't going to be ready for one, or he thinks one year, I think two, maybe reality is three. What can you do before the future is ready, right? Before the technology is ready, you have to find really good ideas.

Then there's a trick because I would say, better say a trap, but because a lot of venture capitalists when they invest, they basically tell you to focus on something which goes against that sort of strategy. Right.

But only focus on one thing as opposed to have a series of what I call waypoints, a series of islands you can stop at before you get to the new world.

Yeah. Yeah. So like in early days, like let's say 2020 or something like that, has been like even from within the company to focus on meat rather than doing cosmetics.

Ah, so you had to, as the founder, get everybody around the right idea that could generate revenue today.

Yeah, because there will be this hype cycle stuff. Yes, there will be hype crash. Ah, yeah. So we need to be ready by then. Got it. Yeah.

And is this your first company, your first startup? Okay. What have you learned? And then we'll open up to questions. If you have questions, you can line up at the microphone. What have you learned? What mistakes have you made that you've corrected in terms of company building, raising capital, you know, and getting product market fit? Yeah. Or mistakes that— Mistakes.

Yeah.

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Team building really matters. That's one. And team building starts from day zero of like, okay, let's do something within yourself, decide to do something which could be a startup, could be a nonprofit or whatever. Yeah. And doing it alone, solo, so-called solopreneur, possible. But eventually you need to find like someone else to work with. Yes. Yeah.

And you have to get it right. If you get it wrong, you have to correct very quickly.

Quick iteration is everything.

Quick iteration.

Yeah. But even with quick iteration, I would say something like some, I would say the Plowey style or whatever, like the general direction.

Yes.

Of I think that's something you call a vision.

Yeah.

Yeah. For us it was easy because I could do it like, like I also do like computer graphics. Yes. So I basically showed all these images. That I made for fun. And that's where we're going to.

And right, like Elon says, we're going to Mars. Oh yeah, before Mars, we have to get a rocket and put some stuff in space, and then we can have Starlink to help solve a problem with the rockets. Yeah, that generates revenue.

And yeah, by drawing this kind of things, it actually gives you an idea of, okay, with that sort of future, what component technologies do we actually need?

So working backwards from science fiction in a crazy vision.

Yeah, because the reason why I started working on cell culture is because of science fiction, anime, manga, and video games.

Oh really? Yeah, because you were scared about the future, like, or the nightmare future was in it, or, or positive future?

The positive future.

Got it, utopian future.

Yeah, like in Doraemon.

Yeah, very nice. Okay, so some questions. So tell me about how you get to product market fit while we wait for the questions.

Yeah, to be honest, when it comes to food, it's not in product market fit yet because we cannot even put product on the market yet. So that's a work in progress. But when it comes to cosmetics, then, like, it's lots of, like, asking, conversations, trust building. It's not at all something like someone with an MBA do something smart and then there's a deal. It doesn't work that way. It just takes lots of trust building and asking people, like, maybe sometimes drinking together and that kind of thing from the beauty company.

And you have to go to the beauty company, explain what you're doing, and then listen to them and build a trusted relationship.

Yeah. And after it's all go, they all go in parallel.

Yes.

Yeah.

I think it's very important.

Yeah. And then what we figured out is that when it comes to this kind of beauty products, then it's actually the sales, this hard-earned sales channel is what matters. And it's not actually the patent on the ingredient itself and things like that.

Ah, they have worked hard to build a brand, have distribution, and they've built trust on their side of the business. You build trust with them, then they can take what you've done and give it to their customers. Yeah, but they have to trust you first. I've learned this lesson, you know, also in the Middle East when I first started going to the Middle East, they said it's a very family dynamic and people want to build a relationship. Then do business. In America, you do business, you do a deal, and then you decide if you want to be friends. And I think in Japan, you become friends as you're doing business. It's 3 different cultures. Yeah, it's all slightly different. You know, in America, everybody fights to be an investor in your company. We become investors, and then maybe we become friends or not. Maybe I'll just be very distant. And you have some venture capitalists who are just you know, put money in and they send you emails and talk about the business, but no friendship, no birthday card, you know. And then other ones, they send you when you have a baby, baby clothes with the name of the venture capital firm that backed you. Sequoia would send a onesie. So when we had our baby, they sent a cute onesie with the Sequoia Capital logo on it. I thought it was very cute, very fun. But I think we now have a framework Do a deal, build a relationship. Build a relationship, that's America. And then in Japan, maybe build a relationship as you're building a business together. And then maybe in the Middle East, in Saudi, UAE, it's get to know each other, then build the business. Very interestingly, you know, different in each case. I don't know about Europe. I don't think they're building businesses there anymore. Okay, so tell us your question, your name, your company, and your question, please. Hi, I'm Natalie, building Playpen. So we make anyone easy to build robots. So I actually have two questions that I'm quite curious about because we also do open source community. So one is, how did the open source community react to your company's commercialization? Oh, good question. Yeah. So you had the open source community for 10 years plus, and then you made a for-profit. How did they respond?

From the early phase, we had this like overall framework of how things should be like this open source community doing like all the bio art and sort of like a visionary visioneering. And then we have this nonprofit organization speaking with academia and maybe the government. Then there's this for-profit entity that does the physical infrastructure. Therefore, like IP, how to make open, how to scale proprietary. And we had all this kind of overall framework already, like shown from early phase. So a lot of the members, it wasn't a surprise for most of the members.

Got it. So good communication.

Yeah.

Okay. Next question.

And also clear vision.

In a way, very clear.

Yeah.

What was the impact of the open source angle when you were raising from VCs?

They didn't really care, to be honest. Yeah. So because it's not the— they knew that it's not the initial IP that really matters. It will be more about the IP to be generated as the company operates.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think we've seen that many times. Open source project. WordPress powers a lot of the web. My friend Matt Mullenweg created it and everybody was using it, but he made the commercial version and hosted version. And so VCs were like, yeah, if a bunch of open source people want to go through the trouble of forking it or standing it up themselves, OK, fine. But the businesses don't want to do that. They want to have a partner who they can trust, right? Back to trust. So great questions. Awesome. Yeah. OK, we'll take another question.

Hello, Richard from Nakatomi, a cybersecurity company. My question is around, are you working with organizations like NASA or JAXA to do this type of like culture in space?

Because that would be actually a really great use case because getting protein to the astronauts, especially if they're on the moon. Such a good question. Yeah, because you can't bring cows to space yet.

Yeah. So the very short succinct answer will be yes. It's like more specifically like the Cabinet Office Moonshot, not Moonshot, the other one, Stardust Project. And this potential application in space is also what led us to get into seed round funding, mainly as an open source project. I was pitching for this potential space application of this technology, and that made it to like television broadcast. And a professor in Tokyo Women's Medical University, Professor Shimizu, and he's himself being an expert in regenerative medicine, he's also a space enthusiast. And he decided to call us in to Tokyo Women's Medical University. We got there and basically we agreed to work together. So we now have a very prestigious advisor working with us. Fantastic. That basically led to the seed round.

Great. So you built up your credibility and then were able to raise— did you raise from American VCs, Japanese-based VCs, or both?

In 2018, in the seed round, we raised from Japanese VCs and even the government-backed VC as well, sovereign VC, I would say. Sure. Yeah. And because of our own administrative capability shortcomings, we couldn't take international ones. Although one of the international VCs said yes, but it was kind of oversubscribed. Ah, yeah. So, but in the Series A and the next one, 2020, we got Accfunder on board and also Venture University partners.

Great, awesome. All right, one more question. Hello, I'm Howard from LFAOS. We build the student record for tutoring agencies.

My question is that in traditional meat or even for processed meat, there's a certain hierarchy that is based on both cost and also public perception.

Do you think this hierarchy would exist for like cultivated or lab-processed meat?

And what do you make of this trend? Yeah, so it will be more of a future stuff because we will be talking about the mainstream phase. So I have to admit that it will be a bit of a fantasy that I'm going to say, but I think it will be a separate category. And at least those existing brand owners don't want cell-cultured versions to get into their field. So it would inevitably— cell-cultured meat will be outside the existing hierarchy. And like, then comes the question, like, should we call our product even meat? Is actually another. And as of now, Ministry of Agriculture, Forests and Fisheries, or MAF in Japan, they are refraining from calling it meat. Got it. It's cell-cultured food. Got it.

So that's a great question. Yeah, I think we had in America, I think it was Burger King. Somebody can look it up, Bianca. I think it might have been Burger King that had either Beyond Meat or the Impossible Burger. Maybe, you know, it was Impossible Burger. And do they still do it? I wonder. They do. Yeah, I think it's been successful. Hamburger, I think, is the holy grail. If you can make a great hamburger.

Yeah.

That's going to be amazing. Yeah, maybe 10 years.

Yeah. So because it will be a commodity product, so it takes time to get to that price point. But that is a holy grail. Yes.

And it could be healthier.

Yeah.

And it could be designed to be very healthy. There's a product in Japan only.

Yeah.

It's Coca-Cola that helps you lose weight. What's it called? Coca-Cola Special. I just got it at 7-Eleven.

I'm sure that someone in America has decided to dope Coke with GLP-1 or something.

Yeah, no, this is Coca-Cola though with fiber in it. Somebody look it up and tell me the name. Wow, incredible. So we just heard the Impossible Whopper is one of their most successful. It's in a white label, this Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola Plus. Has anybody tried it? Raise your hand if you have. You have? What do you think? It's incredible. I had it and it— Coke Zero tastes like better than Coke, um, Diet Coke. It's like more syrupy and delicious. And then Coke— what's this one called? Plus. Coca-Cola Plus has, I think, fiber in it and no calories. And you lose weight from it. As I drank it, I was working last night, I was a little bit late, and I had a Coca-Cola Plus on ice, and I said, oh, if they had this in America, I would be even slimmer, like a model, like a fashion model slim. I would be like runway slim.

You could try for a K-pop star then.

Like K-pop, I could be— we could start a K-pop band together. We would be incredible. Yeah, you could be the nerdy, I could be sporty K-pop member. We have a— how many members do we need? 3 more? You need 5, right?

Uh, possibly, yeah.

Possibly 5. We could be like the old entrepreneurial K-pop band. All right, listen, this has been a pleasure. I wish you great success. Let's give a round of applause to Dr. Yuki.

Thank you.

Okay, and we'll see you next time on This Week in Startups from Japan.