While other cultivated meat companies are collapsing, this one turned a profit | E2317

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
Let me drink a hot cup of tea.
That didn't get picked up on the mic, did it? How's it going, Show? You okay?
Okay, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups in Japan.
It's great, great to be back in my favorite city in all the world, after my hometown of New York, my new hometown of Austin, that's Tokyo. And I love coming here. It's always so inspiring. If you're a founder, if you're an investor and you haven't come to Japan, I highly recommend coming because you get to see people building and working with extreme pride and trying to get better at building their product or service every day of their life. It's called Kaizen is the art of constant improvement. The founders here in our second cohort of Founder University have been incredible. I was telling my team, the first cohort, we had so many great companies, but very raw. We were just getting started. And the second cohort, we saw a lot more companies that were ready to go global and that had their company formation in the United States. So I think we're actually going to find some really great investments or candidates to come to our accelerator. If you want to find out about this Founder University program, we run it twice a year in Tokyo, twice a year in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and then twice a year in the United States. Founder.University is the web page where you can see all three programs. The sun never sets on Founder University, and you don't even need to be incorporated. It could be you and two of your friends. You've built a project. You've got a prototype. You've vibe-coded something in lovable or Claude code or Grok or perplexity computer. We want to see it all. We love to work with founders in year zero. And I'm super excited today because we have Dr. Yuki Hanyu, and he is making cultivated meat.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:55)
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**Jason Calacanis** (2:28)
You're doing this in a different way than some of the cultured meats that we got to experience in America. I think Impossible Meat was one.

**Yuki Hanyu** (2:37)
That is actually plant-based meat.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:38)
That's plant-based meat. Then what was the next one that did chicken in America?

**Yuki Hanyu** (2:44)
Upside Foods.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:45)
Ah, yes.

**Yuki Hanyu** (2:46)
Yeah, so there are major companies in this field. It's like Upside Foods, Believer Meats now defunct, but there's like Wildtype without that cell called Salmon. Ah, yes.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:57)
What was the Salmon one called?

**Yuki Hanyu** (2:58)
Wildtype.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:59)
Well, yeah. So this has been around for a couple of years.
And between the veggie, the fake chicken, fake fish, or mock, I think is the term, it's gotten some fans in America, but it hasn't broken out yet. Why? Why hasn't it become very mainstream? Or has it?

**Yuki Hanyu** (3:23)
I would say it's just the technology just not being there, because the issue has always been the scaling and unit price. And also on the other side, that will be the unit economics that's not quite working yet.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:37)
Got it. So consumers have shown they want it, correct?

**Yuki Hanyu** (3:41)
And that's another, because unless you have a sufficient quantity, you can't even test for real to the consumers. And until then, it will be all fantasy, to be honest.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:55)
There hasn't been enough scale for a large amount of customers to try it. So it's hard to understand demand.
But I know from my friend group in San Francisco...

**Yuki Hanyu** (4:05)
You can always ask that what consumers say and what they actually buy are always very different, as you know.

**Jason Calacanis** (4:12)
As Steve Jobs taught us, right? If he asked people what they wanted in an iPhone, it would not be beautiful, elegant. And I guess when it comes to food, if you were to ask a chef, if the chef were to ask you what you wanted, you would not be as delicious as Omo Kasai.
Yeah, correct?

**Yuki Hanyu** (4:30)
Yeah, I go for like half price, for 30% off, things like that.

**Jason Calacanis** (4:35)
Yeah, you want to really have a... So your company, IntegriCulture, IntegriCulture is working on a new way to create this food, yes?