Industrial biotechnology · Recombinant proteins
Future Fields
An Edmonton company that replaced the steel bioreactor with a genetically engineered fruit fly. It watched the market it was built for collapse, pivoted into contract protein manufacturing for pharma, and opened its first commercial plant in December 2024.
The line at Tim Hortons
Matt Anderson-Baron was finishing a PhD in cell biology at the University of Alberta and moonlighting on a startup that was supposed to grow chicken without a chicken. He had made the nugget. He could not make the arithmetic work.
The bottleneck was growth factors, the proteins that tell cultured cells to divide. They cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per milligram. “I kept looking at the numbers and it never worked,” he told a Digital Journal audience in September 2025. “You couldn’t get the cost down far enough to make cultured meat viable.”
He and his wife Jalene were standing in line for coffee when she asked the question that redirected the company. Why not use the fruit flies he worked with every day in the lab?
“I’m the least scientific of the three co-founders,” Jalene Anderson-Baron told AgFunderNews in 2021. Because she was far enough from the science, she said, the idea did not seem crazy to her.
The problem under the problem
Almost every biological product starts in a bioreactor: a steel tank running microbes or mammalian cells. Building one takes capital and years. Future Fields argues that ten billion litres of capacity will be needed by 2030 for cultivated protein alone, against roughly 61 million litres today, a figure Canadian outlets have carried without independent verification.
Its answer was to skip the tank. Insert the gene for a target protein into a fly embryo, breed the line, rear the flies on agricultural byproducts, harvest the larvae and purify what comes out. Unlike E. coli or yeast, the fly can add the post-translational modifications many human proteins require, and the company says it can target more than 200 distinct cell types inside one animal. “Where we come in is we replace the bioreactor with an insect,” Anderson-Baron told TechCrunch in 2023.
Three friends from the punk scene
The company was incorporated in 2018 by Matt Anderson-Baron, Jalene Anderson-Baron, who holds an MA from the same university, and their friend Lejjy Gafour. “We met hanging out in the punk scene in Edmonton,” Gafour said in 2021. “We like to say we went from punk rock to bio-punk.”
Gafour was chief executive through the seed round and the first shipments. He has since left; by August 2022 Edmonton reporting placed him at CULT Food Science, and the current team page lists only the Anderson-Barons among founders. Both have a fruit fly tattoo.
A basement lab and 82 meetings
The first outside money was small: about $480,000 from undisclosed angels and Singapore’s GROW agrifood accelerator, which wrote a $100,000 cheque and, by the CEO’s account, taught him what a business model was.
When the pandemic closed labs, Anderson-Baron built one in his basement. That is where the team first showed, in July 2020, that a fruit fly could express a cell culture protein. Y Combinator took them into the Summer 2020 batch. In thirteen days they held 82 investor meetings and closed $2.2 million, led by Bee Partners with Pioneer Fund, Narrative Fund and Y Combinator.
“We kept pitching, and we kept sucking. But every time, we sucked a little less,” he said of the early attempts.
The market they built for went away
Products shipped in February 2021, mostly to cultivated meat companies. Then that sector stopped raising money. Believer Meats, Meatable, CellRev, Upstream Foods and SCiFi Foods have all wound down or been absorbed since 2024.
“We weren’t seeing the growth we expected. Companies disappeared. The market just didn’t take off the way people thought it would,” Anderson-Baron said.
So Future Fields stopped selling a catalogue and started selling a service, taking contracts to manufacture other companies’ difficult proteins. In November 2024 it opened Instar 1.0, a 6,000 square foot plant in downtown Edmonton built for roughly three kilograms of purified protein a year. In June 2025 it closed an $8 million Series A co-led by Amplify Capital, the Business Development Bank of Canada’s Climate Tech Fund and R7 Partners.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Federal funding | $5 million from Sustainable Development Technology Canada, part of an announcement covering 17 cleantech companies on Feb 17, 2023. Two Canadian outlets report the amount, and it was folded into the $11.2M announced five days later as a round. | Independent |
| Peer-reviewed validation | No paper on the EntoEngine found in PubMed as of Sep 23, 2026. The only indexed paper by the founder is academic work on lipid droplets in Drosophila, Journal of Cell Science, 2022. | Not found |
| Patents | The company has called the EntoEngine patented since 2023, and AgFunderNews reported a first application published in May 2021. No granted US patent appears under Matthew Anderson-Baron or Future Fields, searched Sep 23, 2026. | Not found |
| Yield | “A remarkable CHO-equivalent production benchmark of up to 305 grams per liter,” attributed to validated industry data. No method or third party report published. | Company-stated |
| Environmental claims | 86 percent less carbon and 74 percent less water, citing third party assessments that have not been released. A life cycle analysis was still under way when the COO was interviewed. | Company-stated |
| Plant size | The 2023 raise promised kilogram scale in 10,000 square feet. Canadian Business described a 1,115 square metre plant. Taproot and the launch release both say 6,000 square feet. What opened is the smaller number. | Differs across accounts |
| Customer count | “Over 60 companies” per the 2023 release and Taproot. In 2025 the CEO described the same period as proteins sent to “more than 40 companies across 21 countries.” | Differs across accounts |
| Named customers | None. A “Fortune Global 500 organization” increasing consumption 200 percent quarter over quarter, at least one top 10 drugmaker on a preclinical protein, and trials with an unnamed global food manufacturer. | Company-stated |
| US securities filings | No Form D on SEC EDGAR, as expected for a Canadian company raising outside Regulation D. | Public record |
Read plainly: the money and the building are documented, and a federal cleantech programme and a bank-owned climate fund both wrote cheques. The performance numbers are not. Every figure that would let a buyer compare the EntoEngine with a CHO line, the yield, the carbon, the water, comes from the company and points at assessments nobody outside it has read. For a contract manufacturer selling into pharma, that is the gap to close.
What to watch
- A named customer, or a case study with a counterparty on it. The Fortune Global 500 client and the top 10 drugmaker have both been referenced for two years without a name.
- A granted patent. The company has called the platform patented since 2023; public databases do not yet show one.
- Profitability. The CEO said in June 2025 that the company expects to reach it on the Series A, an unusual thing for a platform biotech to say out loud.
- Whether Instar 1.0 hits three kilograms a year. Full capacity was forecast 12 to 18 months after opening, which puts the test in 2026.
In their words
“Where we come in is we replace the bioreactor with an insect.”
Matt Anderson-Baron, co-founder and CEO, TechCrunch, 2023 · Independent
“I’m the least scientific of the three co-founders”
Jalene Anderson-Baron, co-founder and COO, AgFunderNews, 2021 · Independent
“We met hanging out in the punk scene in Edmonton,”
Lejjy Gafour, co-founder, Edmonton Global, 2021 · Independent
“We weren’t seeing the growth we expected. Companies disappeared. The market just didn’t take off the way people thought it would.”
Matt Anderson-Baron, Digital Journal, September 2025 · Independent
“Typically, clients come to work with us because they’ve struggled to make proteins in legacy platforms.”
Matt Anderson-Baron, AgFunderNews, June 2025 · Independent
“We’re a highly capital efficient company, particularly compared to others in our industry. We expect to get to profitability with this new financing.”
Matt Anderson-Baron, AgFunderNews, June 2025 · Independent
“Their potential to drive down costs across the cellular agriculture industry makes them an essential player in the synthetic biology stack.”
Kira Noodleman, principal, Bee Partners, University of Alberta Folio, 2021 · Investor
“Future Fields’ technology is a game changer. It brings about a new way of manufacturing proteins at a much lower cost and GHG footprint.”
Pascal Lanctot, partner, BDC Climate Tech Fund, June 2025 release · Company release
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordY Combinator company profile, batch Summer 2020
- Public recordPubMed search, Future Fields
- Public recordPatent search, Anderson-Baron and Future Fields
- Public recordSEC EDGAR Form D search, no filings found
- IndependentFuture Fields is turning fruit flies into bioreactors
- IndependentThe answer to cell-cultured meat’s biggest conundrum? Fruit flies
- IndependentFuture Fields raises $11.2m to scale up fruit flies
- IndependentFuture Fields raises $8m Series A to expand fruit fly biomanufacturing platform
- IndependentFuture Fields looks to solve industry’s biomanufacturing woes
- IndependentFuture Fields CEO on the messy reality of building a life sciences company
- IndependentFuture Fields gets funding to scale fruit-fly-powered biomanufacturing
- IndependentFuture Fields uses fruit fly-based proteins for cultivated food, medicines
- IndependentEdmonton startup gets $2.2-million boost to help develop lab-grown meat
- IndependentCultivated meat’s casualties
- IndependentUnleashing the global potential of cellular agriculture
- CompanyFuture Fields Lands $11.2M USD to Turn Flies Into Cleantech Bioreactors
- CompanyFuture Fields Debuts Instar 1.0
- CompanyFuture Fields Closes Oversubscribed $8M Series A
- CompanyEntoEngine technology page and FGF2 performance data
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
