How two Sydney startups are quickly reshaping food, pharma, and the human body.
Welcome to the Alts Sunday Edition 👋
Twenty minutes south of Sydney’s CBD, on a nondescript road in the industrial suburb of Alexandria, there’s a row of squat brick buildings that you’d never look at twice.
But behind two of them, something remarkable is happening…
The intersection of biology and engineering has created some huge breakthroughs for humanity lately — from gene editing, to GLP-1s.
But few companies represent that convergence better than Vow, who is engineering entirely new categories of meat without touching a live animal, and Inventia Life Science, who is building robotic tools that print living human tissue directly from cells (skin, brain, pancreas).
This week, we got a private tour of both companies as part of our latest Altea meetup.
There’s no substitute for seeing this stuff in person. Not just hearing the pitch, but watching bioprinters work, tasting new proteins, and speaking directly with the founders building it all from scratch.
Humanity is going through a wholesale rethink of how we interact with the living world — and APAC biotech startups are particularly well-positioned to capitalize on it.
This is innovation you can see, touch, and taste.
Let’s explore 👇
Bonus: Vow is currently raising a funding round to scale their growth. We’re planning to open an SPV so Altea members can invest alongside. Express interest here.
Table of Contents
Inventia Life Science: Printing tissue with nanoliter precision
Inventia Life Science builds tools that help researchers recreate human biology in the lab.
Their core product is RASTRUM, a (shockingly gorgeous) bioprinter that creates three-dimensional models of actual human tissue by printing cells into a gel — 30 nanoliters at a time. (That’s thirty-billionths of a liter.)
This speeds up cancer research, by letting scientists test thousands of potential cancer treatments in the lab, without needing to experiment on humans.
Think of it like a rehearsal space for disease biology.
How the technology works
If you’re a cancer researcher today, the biggest challenge isn’t just finding a drug that works — it’s making sure it works in the right environment.
See, cancer cells behave differently depending on what surrounds them. A cancer treatment might show good results in a petri dish, but humans aren’t made out of petri dishes!
It costs nearly a billion dollars to bring a drug to market today. Drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time. There’s even a term for it, called Eroom’s Law (“Moore” backwards.)
And drug companies are well aware that plastic surfaces (the default in modern labs) are poor approximations of the human body. These environments don’t capture the microarchitecture of living tissue. They don’t show how immune cells interact with tumors.
Inventia’s platform changes all this.
It allows researchers to build custom tissue models with control over stiffness, porosity, spatial layout, and the surrounding extracellular matrix. The system prints cells and synthetic gels together to form complex structures — and it does so consistently.
“We’re not just putting cells on plastic. We’re trying to mimic real tissue environments — stiffness, composition, all of it — so the cells behave the way they actually would in the body.”
– Dr Cameron Ferris, COO
Much of Inventia’s engineering has been shaped co-founder Dr Aidan O’Mahony, whose background in high-speed inkjet printing informed Inventia’s droplet control and fluid dynamics.
The RASTRUM bioprinter applies this same precision to biology — printing living cells with the accuracy of an industrial machine.
But the company’s value doesn’t just lie in the hardware. A major part of the platform is Inventia’s proprietary software, which allows scientists to easily configure and manage complex models in an (oddly sexy) user interface.
“We spent just as much time on the software layer as the hardware. Scientists aren’t programmers. It needs to work out of the box.”
– Dr Cameron Ferris
To be clear, Inventia did not invent bioprinting. The technique has been around in research labs for over a decade.
But they were the first to pioneer technology that makes it truly reliable. Their key innovation was achieving the level of precision and reproducibility needed for pharma teams to actually trust and adopt it.
“Reproducibility is the hardest part. You can build something beautiful, but if you can’t repeat it, no one will adopt it. We focused hard on getting that right early on.”
– Dr Cameron Ferris
The next frontier: Regenerative medicine
But what’s most exciting about Inventia is what’s coming next.
Using the same core technology as RASTRUM, they’ve also built LIGŌ, a surgical robot platform that is designed to work alongside surgeons in the operating theatre and can help wounds heal by printing a person’s own living skin cells onto their wound (!)
They even let us try the machine:
Inventia’s LIGŌ machine “prints” actual cell structures in minutes. This live demo didn’t use cells, but the “gel-like” output is textured the same: clear, soft, squishy, and slightly rubbery.
This is truly groundbreaking technology, and it has the potential to supplement (or even replace) traditional skin grafting, a technique that’s increasingly under strain as experienced clinicians retire and fewer new ones enter the field. (Apparently very few medical students desire to become professional skin grafters these days.)
In a world-first human clinical trial, Inventia has taken a small biopsy of a patient’s skin, isolated the cells, and printed them back with a biomaterial scaffold that helped regenerate a damaged area.
Eventually, Inventia could support AI-guided surgery, replacing organ transplants with printed human tissue.
And it doesn’t stop there. With the modular surgical robot they have developed, work has already begun on adding new tools and functions to the system to handle more parts of a procedure — helping surgeons work with even greater precision, consistency, and care for better patient outcomes.
It’s companies like Inventia that make you realize the future isn’t science fiction, it’s science fact.
Vow: A new kind of meat, built from scratch
After our tour of Inventia, we walked over to Vow, another fascinating biotech startup located just around the corner.
If you recognize the name Vow, perhaps it’s because they were recently featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg.
Or perhaps it’s because you heard about their Mammoth Meatball: A lab-grown, cultivated meatball using genetic material from an extinct woolly mammoth. (Yes, really).
But Vow’s story is about to get even more interesting, because on June 18, Vow became the first company legally authorized to sell cultured meat in Australia and New Zealand.
This approval is huge, and it came after a long and complex process. Not because the science wasn’t ready — but because the legal framework wasn’t.
Vow had been selling their cultured Japanese quail foie gras at high-end restaurants in Singapore for over a year. The Australian government was happy to try and accommodate, but there was simply no existing category for cell-cultivated foods in the law.
So Aussie regulators had to create a new food framework from scratch — only the third country to ever do so after Singapore and the US.
“When we started this journey, there wasn’t a single market in the world where cultivated meat was legal to sell. Singapore changed that. They were first, because they’re a net food importer, there’s no alternative. They’re trying to build food resilience. So they’re willing to lead on regulation. That made it easier for us to get going. And now Australia has followed.”
– George Peppou, Vow founder and CEO
As of today, there are just 79 venues around the world selling cultured meat (most of them in Singapore) and Vow is currently served in 76 of them. This number is expected to shoot up now that Australia has a legal carveout for cultured meat.
But before we go further, let’s take a step back to understand how this stuff is actually made.
How cultured meat is made. (Don’t you dare call it fake!)
At the center of Vow’s biological process is a nutrient-rich liquid soup called a media. It’s a blend of amino acids, sugars, salts, and vitamins that cells feed on in order to grow.
Vow’s media formulation is one of the company’s most important pieces of IP. It took four years to perfect, and is tailored to deliver the precise flavor, fat content, and texture that chefs want.
“It’s not just any broth. This is years of iteration — tweaking sugars, proteins, salts — to make sure the cells grow and taste the way we want them to.”
– George Peppou
Just like Inventia, Vow’s process starts with a small biopsy — except instead of taking cells from a human, they’re taken from, say, a Japanese quail.
After placing the cells into the media, the cells begin to divide. They double every 24 hours, then double again, and again, and again…
If you let the cell replication process continue, then boom — after a few weeks you’ve got an enormous vat full of animal biomass.
This is the starting point for Vow’s one-of-a-kind creations:
What does it taste like?
If you’ve never tasted cultured meat before, there’s a tendency to think it’s similar to beef or chicken. But that’s not quite right.
It’s delicious, yes, but it’s not stringy. There are no tendons or connective tissue. The mouthfeel is soft, smooth, and pleasing – not tough like a steak.
I’d describe it more like a savory icing. You probably wouldn’t want to eat it straight, but that’s okay.
Given the texture initially ends up this way, George figured hey, let’s run with it! Let’s not try to recreate what people are used to. Let’s go high-end, and make this a standalone, premium product. A delicacy.
“We’re not trying to recreate steak. It’s more like a pâté, more like a parfait. That’s the format we can scale and make delicious.”
From there, the team puts the product through a full food development and cooking process, transforming the base into some absolutely delightful textured creations: rich foie gras, whipped quail spreads, mineral-infused meats, even edible tallow candles!
In fact, Vow’s team is now working closely with restaurants to develop unique, “re-brandable” dishes that showcase the product’s unique properties.
There are no limits here, and a ton of flexibility. Chefs are given suggestions, but not told how to serve. There’s plenty of room for freedom, exactly what top chefs love.
“One venue does it as a torchon with a little pickle. Another does foie gras parfait on a smoked duck donut. Each chef has their own way to tell the story.”
Sidestepping the ethical debate
Is this meat?
What’s fascinating to me about this industry is how nobody really knows what to call this stuff yet!
Since no animals died to make it, there are lively debates over whether or not this food is vegetarian, vegan, or even halal.
Vow indeed considers it meat, having settled on the term “cultured meat.” But the company has been savvy in how they’ve navigated (and essentially side-stepped) the inevitable food ethics culture war.
George, who is not a vegan, knows this stuff can be volatile, and has made a conscious decision not to market Vow’s products as vegan or vegetarian (even though, arguably, they could be considered as such.)
“We’re not saying this is for vegans. It’s not. This is for meat eaters. That’s where the impact is.”
It’s time for Vow to scale (And you can invest!)
So, what’s next for Vow?
Behind the scenes, the team is ramping up production capacity and getting ready to scale.
Their massive 20,000-liter “Andromeda” bioreactor is capable of producing world-leading yields: already successfully producing over 4,000 lb of protein in a week.
Retail is the next logical avenue. With Australia now officially on board, there’s nothing stopping Vow from going beyond high-end restaurants and into grocery stores, hotels, catering companies, and airlines.
But I think Vow’s future goes far beyond retail.
At its core, Vow seems less of a food company, and more of a well-oiled engineering/manufacturing firm. They’ve raised $74m to date, and with product-market fit in tow, the sky’s the limit.
And when you have a completely custom-built facility, world-leading biotech expertise, and world-class talent (after all, George has successfully recruited employees from SpaceX), you can do all sorts of cool stuff.
To help support the next phase of growth, we’re organizing an SPV investment in Vow’s current funding round. Altea members have the chance to invest alongside Vow as it embarks on a global rollout.
You must be an Altea member to invest.
Closing thoughts
Australia is uniquely positioned in the biotech race 🇦🇺
Vow and Inventia are just scratching the surface of what’s happening down under.
Just another few blocks away lies Tetratherix, who makes another kind of biomaterial platform and who just went public. And that’s to say nothing of Melbourne, where companies like Cortical Labs are placing living human neurons on a chip, and teaching them to play Pong.
During our tour of Inventia, COO Dr Cameron Ferris mentioned that many people think the US has the best researchers & scientists in the world.
But while America’s talent pool is enormous, Australia has a level of talent and innovation that punches way above its weight, quality-wise.
Australia’s scientific infrastructure is remarkably strong: world-class universities, elite engineers, and a robust public grant system. In fact, Inventia’s origins are grounded in Australian grant funding — both federal and state — which allowed the company to build the platform without relying heavily on venture capital.
They had to fulfill employment guarantees, but the early public support helped them stay focused on long-term infrastructure over short-term milestones. These programs work.
To the degree that something is missing in Australia, it’s not capital, and it certainly isn’t capability. It’s just a deep risk-taking culture.
🎧 Listen to me and Michael Thompson discuss this on Fear + Greed:
While Aussie academics are hesitant to leave cushy public sector jobs, America’s insatiable appetite for risk-taking means there’s a constant revolving door between academia and industry. A beautiful feedback loop between invention and education.
In Australia, that feedback loop is getting faster. And the more that loop tightens, the more you’ll see other Australian companies not just follow the global biotech wave, but lead it.
The Singapore connection 🇸🇬
One of the more striking patterns we saw was how both companies find traction outside Australia first — not in the US, but in Singapore.
Singapore’s regulators have taken deliberate steps to welcome biotech. They’ve created faster, clearer approval pathways to make biotech development easier. They understand the economic upside of being first.
The result is a small but growing set of companies who view Singapore not just as a market, but as a springboard.
If you’re reading this from Singapore, we’d love to connect! Altea is actively expanding our community in Southeast Asia, and we want to meet the builders and investors who are shaping the next chapter.
If that’s you, reply to this email or shoot us a note in the community. Let’s talk.
This is what Altea is all about 🥂
Finally, it wouldn’t be right if I ended this issue without a plug!
But in all seriousness, these are exactly the sort of behind-the-scenes startup tours that make Altea special.
There’s something surreal about watching someone print human skin from a robot arm — or tasting foie gras that never passed through a bird. (You can probably fit the number of people who have experienced either of these things into a small venue.)
You can read about companies like Inventia and Vow in journals or headlines. But seeing them in person is something else entirely. You begin to understand how far along this technology really is.
That’s a big part of why we run Altea meetups like this. It’s not just about networking or deal flow. It’s about proximity. Getting close to the people and places where transformation is actually happening. Touching the tools. Asking real questions. Forming your own impressions, not just relying on the marketing deck.
We’re not here to speculate on hype. We’re here to meet companies in the real world, long before they hit mainstream consciousness — and help our community members build conviction.
If you want in on the next one, join Altea here.
That’s it for today!
I’d like to give a woolly mammoth-sized thanks to George Peppou, Dr Aidan O’Mahony, and Dr Cameron Ferris for lending their time and showing us around.
Also a big thanks to Blackbird, for being the industrial-strength glue that binds Australia’s startup ecosystem together.
See you next time,
Stefan
Disclosures
- This issue was written and edited by Stefan von Imhof
- As of today, Altea has no holdings in any companies mentioned in this issue
- We are opening an SPV to invest in Vow’s current funding round.
- I am personally planning to invest in Vow through this vehicle
- This issue contains no affiliate links.
