A former heart doctor traded the cath lab for the bioreactor to grow chicken from cells. He made history, hit a $1 billion valuation, and then ran straight into state legislatures that would rather ban his product than taste it.
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.