Shiok Meats

Overview

Shiok Meats was a Singapore-based cellular agriculture startup founded in August 2018 by Dr. Sandhya Sriram and Dr. Ka Yi Ling, two former stem cell scientists from Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). The company pioneered an entirely new category — cultivated crustacean meat — by isolating shrimp, crab, and lobster stem cells and growing them in bioreactors, with the ambition of producing seafood without fishing or aquaculture. It raised approximately $30 million across six rounds, grew to over 40 staff, and became the first alternative protein company accepted into Y Combinator.

Shiok Meats failed because the fundamental biology of cultivating crustacean stem cells at production scale proved intractable. Unlike cultivated beef or poultry, crustacean cellular agriculture had virtually no prior scientific literature to draw on — and the company exhausted its capital runway before it could bridge the gap between R&D-scale milestones and commercial viability.

The company merged with Umami Bioworks in a share-for-share transaction announced in March 2024 and completed in Q3 2024. Shiok Meats ceased to exist as an independent entity. Agronomics, one of its most visible investors, had already fully written down its position by June 2022 — nearly two years before the merger closed — signaling that the financial outcome for investors was deeply unfavorable.

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Founding Story

Dr. Sandhya Sriram and Dr. Ka Yi Ling met as colleagues at A*STAR, Singapore's national research agency, where both worked as stem cell scientists. Their professional backgrounds gave them direct exposure to the mechanics of cellular biology — isolating cells, maintaining them in culture, and coaxing them to proliferate — skills that are foundational to cultivated meat but rarely applied to seafood.

The founding insight was geographic and dietary as much as scientific. Southeast Asia is one of the world's largest consumers of shrimp and crustaceans, yet the region had no presence in the emerging cultivated meat sector, which was almost entirely focused on beef and poultry. Sriram and Ling identified a gap: crustaceans were a massive global protein category, yet no one had attempted to cultivate them at the cellular level. The scientific reason for that absence — the near-total lack of prior research on crustacean stem cell lines — was simultaneously the barrier and the opportunity.

In August 2018, the two scientists left A*STAR and incorporated Shiok Meats with $10,000 from a single angel investor. ^[1] The reaction from peers was immediate skepticism. As Sriram later recalled: "In August 2018, when Ka Yi and I used to tell anyone that we have started Shiok Meats and that we are going to make shrimp meat using stem cells, 90% of the people who heard us told us that we were crazy." ^[2]

That skepticism had a practical consequence: the founders could not rent lab space on the Singapore mainland. Instead, they set up operations on St. John's Island — a small island off Singapore's southern coast — because their research was considered too risky by the scientific establishment. ^[3] The physical isolation was an early signal of how far outside mainstream science this work sat.