Cultivated meat, carbon capture on center stage at D.Day

Simple Planet, a South Korean biotech startup developing sustainable food technologies, has won this month’s startup pitch day held jointly by D.Camp and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), the Korena startup accelerator said on Friday.

The Korea biotech startup produces cell-based food ingredients, using its proprietary cell culture and stem cell platform technologies. Its mainstay products are cultivated meat powder and cultivated unsaturated fat, according to D.Camp.

Using stem cell isolation technology, it separates stem and primary cells from livestock like cows, pigs and chickens. The company has already secured 13 different cell lines to produce different kinds of animal proteins and fats.

Its serum-free culture medium, which can replace expensive fetal bovine serum in culture medium production, is credited for cutting the cost of producing cultivated meat.

Greenerds is the runner-up of this month’s D.Day competition. 

It is currently working to develop Korea’s first electrochemical carbon capture technology, which does not require a thermal process at high temperatures above 900 degrees Celsius.

This new carbon capture technology is garnering interest as a next-generation but affordable and efficient clean technology.

The other four finalists of D.Day for September included virtual power plant developer Vgen; solar panel monitoring system developer Conalog; CBBS, a developer of high-capacity graphene-silicon anode materials for next-generation reusable batteries; and Unda Engineering with the Calor-e Thermal Energy Storage System that can store idle power to reproduce it later.

Unda is the only foreign company, from Turkey, while the rest are Korean startups.

The latest D.Day was held jointly by D.Camp, the Korean startup accelerator backed by the Banks Foundation for Young Entrepreneurs, and UNIDO, a UN agency assisting the economic and industrial development of countries, under the theme of Clean Tech.

Write to Joo-Wan Kim at kjwan@hankyung.com
Sookyung Seo edited this article.