NEW YORK — Startup investor Big Idea Ventures has created the company Nexture Bio, Inc. through its Generation Food Rural Partners Fund (GFRP). Nexture Bio develops biomaterials, including scaffolding, that may be used in the creation of cultivated meat products that may more closely resemble whole cuts of meat.
Teryn Wolfe has been named chief executive officer of the new company. Prior to leading Nexture Bio, Ms. Wolfe was the CEO of Matrix Food Technologies, a company that also is in the alternative protein industry.
“The cultivated meat industry has made incredible progress over the past few years regardless of a plethora of obstacles, technical challenges, and frankly — undeserved pessimism,” Ms. Wolfe said. “I firmly believe that to maintain progress and reach our collective industry-wide goals, we need to focus on enabling technologies like extracellular matrices — or scaffolds.”
Big Idea’s GFRP Fund invests to create new companies formed around research with the greatest chance for broad commercialization. In August, the fund launched its first portfolio company called TerraSafe Materials, Inc. The business is focused on developing new products, coatings, and applications for truly sustainable packaging.
“Additional protein sources are needed to feed the growing human population,” said Frank Klemens, managing director of the GFRP Fund. “I am excited about Nexture Bio because the groundbreaking technology can create structuring technologies that are either edible or will not exist in the final product. Our fund’s mandate is to create companies that provide solutions to the most challenging areas in Food and Agriculture. Nexture Bio plans to address the challenges in the cultivated meats industry using innovative technologies and a dedicated team that prioritizes both technology and the consumer.”Enjoying this content? Learn about more disruptive startups on the Food Entrepreneur page.
