The investment heyday for the space roughly coincided with the peak of the bull market. Cultivated meat companies pulled in over $1.6 billion in 2021 and 2022, per Crunchbase analysis. Leading names like Upside Foods, Believer Meats and Good Meat consumed over a billion between them. That generous funding streak coincided with a period of heavy investment in plant-based meat and dairy substitutes. The heaviest private funding recipient, fake meat unicorn Impossible Foods, raised nearly $2 billion. And rival Beyond Meat had a roughly two-year run as a stock market darling following its 2019 IPO. These days we're no longer seeing rounds in the multiple hundreds of millions for the space. More broadly, larger rounds have declined in both frequency and size for cellular meat and plant-based protein companies.
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