John Pattison and Ian Johnson co-founded Cultured Decadence, a cellular agriculture seafood company developing cell-cultured lobster, in 2020. Based in Madison, Wisconsin, Cultured Decadence is one of the only cellular agriculture companies in the Midwest, and the only company in the United States targeting shellfish. At the beginning of April, Cultured Decadence raised $1.6 million in a pre-seed round and received the first state funding for a cellular agriculture company ⁽¹⁾.I spoke to John—a former New Harvest intern and the current treasurer on our board of directors—to hear about his experience starting a company. Ian also joined the call to share his technical perspective.

In addition to being one of New Harvest’s first interns, Natalie Rubio is a New Harvest Research Fellow working on a PhD in Cellular Agriculture under Dr. David Kaplan at Tufts University. Before relocating to Boston for her PhD studies, Natalie got a taste of the San Francisco tech scene working at Quartzy, and she also helped out in the early days of Perfect Day Foods (then Muufri) while completing her B.S. in Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. Read on to get to know Natalie!

Daan Luining is one of only a handful of cultured meat researchers in the world. He spent the first year of his Masters program working in Dr. Mark Post’s lab (Maastricht University, The Netherlands). Now, Daan is completing the MBA portion of his degree in New York; using his expertise to implement scientific strategy for New Harvest.

Perumal Gandhi co-founded Muufri, a company freshly launched out of New Harvest.