Australian company behind woolly mammoth meatballs axes 30 per cent of workforce

Cultured meat start-up Vow is shedding 30 per cent of its workforce, making 25 staff members redundant, with chief executive George Peppou blaming slower than expected regulatory approvals for the “incredibly difficult decision”.

The Sydney-based company has raised more than $US50 million ($80 million) from high-profile investors, including Hostplus and Blackbird Ventures, to manufacture its range of cultured meats – grown not from animals but from cells in stainless-steel tanks – and get them into high-end restaurants and supermarkets.

Vow chief George Peppou described the layoffs as an “incredibly difficult decision”. Credit: Jessica Hromas

Its novel meat products have made headlines globally, including foie gras made from the cells of Japanese quails and woolly mammoth meatballs made using DNA extracted from 1000-year-old cells of the ancient extinct creatures.

While some of its products have been served in restaurants in Hong Kong and Singapore, the start-up has yet to receive regulatory approvals to sell its products in Australia, and subsequently, this week is making a third of its staff redundant.

In a Slack message to all staff, who are known as “Vowzers”, Peppou said on Monday that the redundancies were in part due to a “very challenging funding environment”.

In addition to Hostplus and Blackbird Ventures’ contributions to its $US50 million fund, Vow has also attracted investment from Square Peg and the family office of Atlassian billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes.

“Team, Vow is finalising a fundraise in a very challenging funding environment – this gives us runway into 2027,” Peppou wrote in the all-staff message seen by this masthead.

“As part of this, the expectation is for Vow’s focus to narrow to only finding product [that is] market fit, continuing to improve manufacturing reliability and reaching [regulatory] approvals in new markets.

“Sadly, this means today we will be saying goodbye to a number of Vowzers.”

Vow has nearly 100 staff, mostly based in Sydney, and had poached engineers from Elon Musk’s SpaceX to build towards Peppou’s lofty goal of creating one of the largest food companies in history.

The chief executive told this masthead it was “an incredibly difficult decision” that it “truly hurt to make”.

“Vow is pioneering success in an industry in which many companies have already failed, with more than 200 companies founded, over $3 billion invested, and still only three with regulatory approvals (one of which is Vow) to sell anywhere in the world,” Peppou said in a statement.

“That success is predicated on solving three main challenges: scale, market demand and market access. Vow is the only company in the world to have solved the first two of these challenges and is leading the world in market access. However, given the complexity and novelty of the regulatory process for cultured meat, it has taken far longer than initially expected to secure regulatory approval in the markets which Vow has targeted.

“The reality is that in order for Vow to continue to grow and thrive, we must get leaner and focus our entire efforts on activities that put our products into more markets and onto more consumers’ plates.”

Peppou said the redundancies were not a reflection on Vow’s staff but instead on what the start-up needs to achieve in the next two years.

“It is my sincere hope that they all choose to stay in our start-up ecosystem because I know they are exactly the calibre of individuals who make groundbreaking innovations possible, and I will do everything in my power to support them to find new roles.”

Vow’s primary investors, including Hostplus and Square Peg, were contacted for comment.

“Like many companies operating in highly technical environments and highly regulated markets, Vow has faced a challenging operating environment as it scales its mission globally,” a Blackbird spokeswoman said.

Hostplus investment chief Sam Sicilia and Square Peg co-founder Paul Bassat, both major backers of Vow.Credit: Arsineh Houspian

“Start-ups require incredibly difficult decisions to be made, and whilst this decision was the most logical thing for the company, it was not made lightly.

“We believe in Vow’s vision for entirely new foods and are confident in its road map to achieving this ambition.”

In a previous interview, Peppou outlined his vision for Vow to provide exciting new products targeted at meat eaters.

“We’re using cell-culture technology to create products that animals and traditional farming could never produce,” he said.

“Imagine a steak that tastes like venison but has the nutritional profile of salmon. That’s the kind of innovation we’re working toward.”

Vow’s move comes amid a challenging time for the broader alternative and plant-based meat sector, with investors admitting they overestimated consumer demand for the new products.

Less than 12 months ago “chicken-free chicken” start-up Sunfed closed its doors and halted sales of its products, which were available in Coles and Woolworths supermarkets. That company was also backed by Blackbird Ventures, and chief executive Shama Sukul Lee said investors, including the Australian venture capital behemoth, had written off her company.

“Essentially, a lot of venture capital investors jumped into the plant-based gold rush, thinking they could get fast valuation returns similar to what they’re used to in the virtual world,” she said at the time.

“The plant-based bubble burst and the category has been undergoing a reality check, and rightly so.”

In 2023, V2food, a joint venture between CSIRO’s venture capital fund Main Sequence Ventures and billionaire Hungry Jack’s founder Jack Cowin, closed its $20 million Wodonga facility and chief executive Nick Hazell departed the company. V2food opened the factory just two years earlier and employed 30 staff.

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