Hangzhou Extreme Mi Biotechnology

Hangzhou Extreme Mi Biotechnology (Jimi Bio), founded in August 2021, is a key player in China's burgeoning cultivated meat sector. The company was established by Zhehou Cao, who holds Master's degrees from Imperial College London in aerospace engineering and was a PhD candidate in neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh before venturing into entrepreneurship. His journey into biotechnology was influenced by his father, a stem cell research scientist, with whom he first co-founded a regenerative medicine company in 2018. This background provides Jimi Bio with a foundation in both engineering and biology, assembling a multidisciplinary team from fields like cell biology, food science, and computer science.

The firm focuses on developing cultivated meat by growing animal cells in bioreactors, aiming to offer a sustainable alternative to traditional animal agriculture. Its primary business involves the research, development, and eventual commercialization of cultivated meat products, targeting consumers and markets concerned with environmental sustainability, animal welfare, and food safety. A significant milestone was achieved in December 2021, just four months after its inception, when Jimi Bio unveiled China's first cultivated beef. This was followed by the development of the country's first 100% cell-based chicken meat, created without any plant-based scaffolding, which is a common component in similar products.

Jimi Bio's core technology revolves around several key areas. The company has developed stable, immortalized cell lines that can replicate for over 50 generations, a critical step for scalable production. It has made substantial progress in reducing production costs by creating a proprietary serum-free and animal-component-free culture medium, lowering the cost to a fraction of commercially available alternatives. Furthermore, the company is innovating with a media recycling system and an AI-driven, high-throughput platform called JEVOS to accelerate R&D. Beyond cultivated meat, Jimi Bio is expanding into related cell-derived products, including health supplements and cosmetics ingredients derived from deer antler stem cells, which diversifies its revenue strategy while the cultivated meat market matures.

Financially, Jimi Bio has secured significant early-stage funding. The initial seed round was provided by Chen Qi, the founder of Mogujie. This was followed by a ¥20 million RMB angel round in late 2022 from investors including Plum Ventures and Fanqie Capital. A few months later, in March 2023, the company closed an additional multi-million dollar angel+ round. These funds are allocated towards talent acquisition, R&D, and facility expansion, with plans for a pilot-scale plant and the goal of reaching industrial production by 2027.

Keywords: cultivated meat, cell-based protein, biotechnology, food tech, sustainable agriculture, cellular agriculture, food production, alternative protein, animal-free meat, bioreactors