Industrial bio · Cultivated seafood
Shiok Meats
The first company anywhere to try to grow shrimp meat from stem cells. Registered in Singapore in August 2018, it raised about US$30 million, never obtained a regulatory approval, and was absorbed in 2024 by a rival that had raised US$2.4 million.
Five dumplings, or eight
In April 2019, a small team in Singapore put a handful of shrimp dumplings on a plate. The meat inside had been grown from stem cells taken from a prawn rather than cut from one, and nobody in the world had done that with a crustacean before.
What the dumplings cost depends on who tells it. In a long public letter in May 2023, co-founder and chief executive Sandhya Sriram wrote that there were five of them and that the price tag ran from US$8,000 to US$10,000. The Business Times, reporting in November 2021, described eight dumplings costing S$5,000 to produce. Neither account was reconciled with the other.
The company had been registered with Singapore’s Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority on August 28, 2018, under UEN 201829394W. Sriram told TIME she filed at 3 a.m.
The hardest version of the problem
Shrimp is the protein Asia eats most of, and the way the world produces it is difficult to defend. Sriram cited roughly 20 pounds of bycatch per pound of wild shrimp, the loss of about 1.5 million hectares of mangrove since 1980, and routine antibiotic use.
Growing crustacean meat in a tank was an answer nobody else was working on, and the hardest version of the problem in the category: almost no published science existed on crustacean stem cells. Poultry and beef startups built on decades of mammalian cell biology. Shiok Meats could not.
In January 2020, Sriram told Reuters that a kilogram of the company’s shrimp meat cost US$5,000, which put a single siu mai dumpling at about US$300. Ninety percent of that, she told Business Insider two months later, was the nutrient solution the cells were fed.
Two scientists who left A*STAR
Sriram and Ka Yi Ling were stem cell biologists at Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research. Ling held an A*STAR National Science Scholarship and a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sriram, born in India and raised in the Middle East, was a lifelong vegetarian who had never eaten shrimp. She tried it the week she registered the company, to have something to compare a prototype against.
They gave themselves a year to make a dumpling and raise a million dollars, and did both. Y Combinator backed a cultivated meat company for the first time. Singapore announced its 30 by 30 food security target the same month, and Shiok Meats became the most visible food technology startup in the country.
The number that kept moving
The cost per kilogram is worth tracking closely, because the company published a new figure roughly every six months and the figures do not line up.
March 2019: about US$5,000 per kilogram, an early estimate. January 2020: US$5,000, with a stated target of US$50 by the end of that year. October 2020: US$5,000 reduced to US$3,500, with a goal of cutting it a hundredfold by the first half of 2021. July 2021: US$1,500, target US$50 in 2022 and eventually US$5. January 2022: a planned launch price of about S$50, described as down from S$1,000 then and US$10,000 two years earlier. February 2022: US$734 currently, launch at US$37. August 2022: US$50 reached, but at research scale only.
The August 2022 interview is where the problem shows. Sriram described the starting point as the US$10,000 or US$5,000 the company had been at previously, while the same publication recalled a 2020 figure of about US$7,000. Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, Green Queen, Bloomberg and Asian Agribiz between them recorded US$5,000, US$3,500, US$1,500, S$1,000 and US$734 across the same stretch. Currency conversion explains part of the spread. It does not explain all of it.
What actually stopped it
In May 2023, Sriram published a candid account of what had gone wrong. The cells would not scale: work that succeeded in small research vessels failed when moved to larger ones. Bioreactors were scarce, with more than fifty cultivated meat companies chasing a handful of vendors.
By then the money had run into a wall too. Global funding for cultivated meat startups peaked at US$989 million in 2021, slipped to US$807 million in 2022, and fell 78 percent to US$177 million in 2023, according to AgFunder. Shiok Meats did two rounds of retrenchment in six months and lost half its staff. In April 2023 it restructured to commercialise red meat first, through Gaia Foods, a Singapore cultivated beef company it had taken a majority stake in during August 2021.
On March 13, 2024, Agronomics Limited, a London-listed cellular agriculture holding company and a Shiok Meats shareholder, told the market that its portfolio company had been acquired by UMAMI Bioworks Pte. Ltd. in a share-for-share transaction. Sriram left. UMAMI, which kept its own name and chief executive, had raised US$2.4 million.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate registration | SHIOK MEATS PTE. LTD., UEN 201829394W, incorporated Aug 28, 2018. A second entity, UEN 202140083Z, incorporated Nov 18, 2021, shows a status of Struck Off as at Mar 26, 2026. | Public record |
| Singapore approval | The Singapore Food Agency published its approved novel foods list in April 2026, covering approvals through October 2025. It names 14 products, four of them cultivated meat: two Good Meat chicken products, Vow quail and a Parima chicken product. Shiok Meats is not on it, though it said in January 2023 it would apply by that April. | Public record |
| The merger, as filed | Agronomics Limited (LSE: ANIC) announced on Mar 13, 2024 that Shiok Meats had been acquired by UMAMI Bioworks in a share-for-share transaction. Agronomics stated its position had been fully written down in the audited results to Jun 30, 2022, and that it now held 0.71% of UMAMI fully diluted, carried at £0.378 million subject to audit. | Public record |
| The merger, as described | UMAMI chief executive Mihir Pershad told AgFunderNews that Shiok Meats could not see a clear path to the larger raise the next phase required. No cash consideration was disclosed by either side. | Independent |
| Cost per kilogram | Company figures from 2019 to 2022: US$5,000, US$3,500, US$1,500, S$1,000, US$734, US$50. The US$50 was explicitly at research scale. A production-scale cost was never published. | Claims differ |
| Total raised | About US$30 million per the company. The Business Times, citing the Tech in Asia database, put disclosed funding at US$20.7 million in March 2024. Named rounds total US$20.2 million; the difference is one unsized 2021 bridge that AgFunder estimated at about US$10 million. | Claim exceeds disclosure |
| Patents | Sriram said in March 2024 that a patent had recently been granted in the EU. The Intellectual Property Office of Singapore called the portfolio provisional patents. No granted patent was located in the records pull. | Company-stated |
| Publications | No PubMed results for the company as of September 23, 2026. | Not found |
Read plainly: the science produced prototypes and attracted serious money, and the record shows it never crossed from research scale into production. The one hard regulatory test, the Singapore Food Agency list, does not have the company on it. What the buyer said it valued at the end was crustacean cell line know-how and some hardware.
What to watch
- Whether UMAMI Bioworks brings any crustacean product forward. Its stated priorities at the merger were eel and grouper.
- UMAMI’s Singapore human food dossier, described in September 2025 as in the final stage of approval.
- Sector direction. The Good Food Institute counted 140 cultivated meat companies in 2025, down from 155, with US$73.9 million raised against US$144 million.
In their words
“Our greatest challenge was that there was no existing science for creating cultivated seafood, so we started from scratch.”
Sandhya Sriram, co-founder and Group CEO, IPOS brand profile · Company-stated
“We are looking at next year, so we might be the first ever company to launch a cell-based meat product in the world,”
Sandhya Sriram, to Reuters, January 2020 · Independent
“This US$50/kg milestone is really a big milestone and a huge win for us compared to the US$10,000 or US$5,000 that we were at previously, it’s a huge update we’re very proud to be sharing with the industry,”
Sandhya Sriram, to FoodNavigator-Asia, August 2022 · Independent
“We’re at an interesting stage of a startup; it’s called the Valley of Death,”
Sandhya Sriram, to TIME, January 2023 · Independent
“So we have lost 50% of our staff in the last 6+ months.”
Sandhya Sriram, public letter, May 2023 · Company-stated
“In this case, this is a stock deal for us to acquire all of Shiok’s assets.”
Mihir Pershad, CEO of UMAMI Bioworks, to AgFunderNews, March 2024 · Independent
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordACRA entity record, UEN 201829394W
- Public recordACRA entity record, UEN 202140083Z, status Struck Off
- Public recordAgronomics Limited Announces Shiok Meats Merges with Umami Bioworks
- Public recordSingapore Food Agency Publishes List of Approved Novel Foods
- IndependentCultivated meat consolidation begins as UMAMI Bioworks to merge with Shiok Meats
- IndependentSG alt-meat makers Shiok Meats, Umami Bioworks set to merge
- IndependentSingapore’s Shiok Meats hopes to hook diners with lab-grown shrimp
- IndependentThe first lab-grown meat for sale could come from this Singapore startup
- IndependentAqua-Spark leads $12.6m Series A round for Shiok Meats
- IndependentShiok Meats’ lab-grown seafood is 2 years from commercial launch
- IndependentShiok Meats confirms 2023 commercial launch plans as cultivated shrimp reaches US$50/kg
- IndependentThe Scientist Leading the Push to Bring Lab-Grown Seafood to Your Plate
- IndependentShiok Meats CEO on losing half its team in 6 months
- Independent78% decline in cultivated meat funding in 2023
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
