cellular-agriculture
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Fengru Lin
Fengru Lin is the co-founder and CEO of TurtleTree, a biotech company making dairy proteins without cows. A former Google account manager who took up cheesemaking as a hobby, she went hunting across Asia for clean raw milk, was horrified by what she found on the farms, and started a company to make milk in a lab instead. TurtleTree pivoted from full cell-cultured milk to precision fermentation, and now produces lactoferrin, a high-value milk protein once called 'pink gold,' using microbes instead of herds. She has raised roughly $44 million and made EDGE's 35 Under 35 and Her World's Young Woman Achiever lists.
Ashley Beckwith
Ashley Beckwith is the founder and CEO of Foray Bioscience, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech growing wood, plant materials, molecules, and seeds from single plant cells - no forests required. Out of her PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT, where she grew wood-like tissue in the lab from a zinnia leaf, she built a company that pairs in-vitro plant cell culture with an AI platform called Pando, billed as an operating system for plant science. The goal: shorten plant development from decades to months and bring biomanufacturing's precision to forestry and conservation.
Niyati Gupta
Niyati Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Fork & Good, a Jersey City cultivated-meat startup betting against the rest of its industry. While competitors chase ever-bigger bioreactors, Gupta builds small ones, arguing that the way to make cell-grown pork as cheap as the real thing is to copy the efficiency of a pig, not the scale of a brewery. A Yale economist and Harvard MBA who advised Nigeria's agriculture ministry and ran a rooftop farm in Singapore before being 'bullied' into starting Fork & Good, she has raised roughly $30M, earned the industry's first cultivated red-meat revenue via a deal with an $8B food manufacturer, and held a public tasting at Davos where half the tasters could not tell her blend from conventional pork.
Justin Kolbeck
Justin Kolbeck is Co-Founder and CEO of Wildtype, the San Francisco-based cultivated seafood company that became the first to receive FDA regulatory clearance for cell-grown salmon in the United States. A former U.S. Foreign Service Officer who served in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Kolbeck channeled his firsthand experience with global food insecurity into co-founding Wildtype in 2016 alongside cardiologist and microbiologist Aryé Elfenbein. The company has raised over $123 million in funding - including a record $100 million Series B backed by Leonardo DiCaprio, Jeff Bezos, and Robert Downey Jr. - and launched its sushi-grade coho salmon at award-winning restaurants in 2025. Wildtype's salmon, grown in stainless steel bioreactors in a converted San Francisco brewery, was named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2025.