As meat prices soar to record highs, The Better Meat Co. (BMC) announced this week that it has closed an oversubscribed $31 million Series A round to scale its patented mycoprotein fermentation platform to commercial levels. The West Sacramento–based company plans to bring its Rhiza mycoprotein to market at prices lower than U.S. commodity ground beef by 2026.
The round was co-led by Future Ventures and Resilience Reserve, with participation from Epic Ventures, Sigma Ventures, Hickman’s Family Farms CEO Glenn Hickman, and others. Both Hickman and Future Ventures co-founder Steve Jurvetson will join BMC’s board.
“We’ve invented and patented our tech, received regulatory approval, scaled to a demonstration plant, and proven demand exists for Rhiza mycoprotein. It’s now time to fully commercialize and introduce our new crop that will help the protein industry cut costs and improve nutrition, all with a much lighter footprint,” CEO Paul Shapiro said in announcing the round.
Shapiro, who has been one of the leading evangelists in the alt-protein space since the publication of his book Clean Meat in 2018, has remained unwavering in his push to end animal agriculture. At the same time, he has taken a pragmatic approach to building alternatives that can gain real traction in the marketplace.
“Even in 2018, I believed that cultivated meat was still something that would be a long time before it made any real dent in the meat market, I wanted to make an impact sooner,” Shapiro told me last year on The Spoon Podcast. That desire for immediate impact, he said, is why he shifted to mycoprotein.
The decision was also shaped by the limitations of plant proteins. “It became very clear that there were a lot of limitations to using plant proteins like flavor, ingredient lists, allergenicity, and volatility in supply chains,” Shapiro said. By contrast, mycoprotein offered better functionality, fewer allergens, and lower costs at scale.
Shapiro and BMC eventually honed in on a strain of Neurospora, which he described as “much more meat-like than Quorn’s product, doesn’t have to be frozen, can be used as a single ingredient, and now has both FDA and USDA approval.”
Shapiro’s pragmatism extended beyond focusing on mycoprotein. He recognized that consumers and mainstream meat brands were not ready to give up animal agriculture altogether, and he saw hybrid products as a way to show early impact and win adoption.
BMC’s early partnership with Perdue Farms led to the successful Chicken Plus line, still on shelves five years later. Shapiro believes hybridization can unlock far greater impact than niche plant-based options. “Imagine if in addition to offering the Impossible Whopper, Burger King were to make the conventional Whopper 20% plant-based. All of a sudden, you’ve got a ten-fold reduction in meat without having to persuade one person to make a different decision.”
With the new round, BMC plans to scale its fermentation facility tenfold and prepare for the commercial rollout of Rhiza in 2026.
At the core, Shapiro’s motivation remains unchanged. His focus on scalability and consumer adoption has now resulted in fresh funding in a difficult fundraising environment and set the company on a pathway toward strong growth.
In a summer when some are claiming cultivated meat is making a comeback thanks to new regulatory approvals, and when highly processed, tech-forward plant-based meats from the likes of Beyond and Impossible are still struggling to find traction, Shapiro has shown that practicality and meeting consumers, retailers, and CPG partners where they are is a winning strategy.
Still, his long-term focus has not shifted. “Maybe in 20 years, people will be shocked if they find out that people are still eating meat from slaughtered animals. They’ll think, ‘why aren’t you using the obviously better innovation that came up with?’”
