This article is a part of Startup Spotlight, a series that features young, up-and-coming startups.
Photo credit: Viknish Krishnan-Kutty
As a child, Viknish Krishnan-Kutty built a small hydrodynamo from the parts of his old toys. During his PhD studies, he decided to shift from academia to entrepreneurship. He launched Cellivate Technologies to find better alternatives to animal-derived products.
😟 Problem
Almost every cell culture lab relies on Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS) to grow cells. Suppliers harvest this serum from the blood of bovine fetuses during slaughter. The cell culture industry consumes over 1.3 million liters of FBS annually. This demand requires harvesting four to eight million fetuses each year.
The serum costs over US$1,000 per liter and takes months to produce. Quality varies between batches, creating inconsistent results for biotech startups and cultivated meat producers. Regulators are looking harder at animal-derived inputs, and xeno-free is becoming a requirement in therapeutics.
💡 Solution
Cellivate Technologies produces a serum replacer called Booster to help cells grow in labs. The company built a magnetic stimulation platform that operates in a controlled environment.
- Tuned magnetic fields stimulate cells to release extracellular vesicles (EVs) that carry essential growth signals.
- The company collects these EVs and processes them into a completely animal-free serum replacer.
- The platform uses no hazardous chemicals and produces serum for around US$300 per liter.
Image credit: Cellivate Technologies
📊 Market size
The global cell culture market is projected to exceed US$40 billion by 2030. Cellivate targets near-term markets in India, Singapore, Australia, and the US.
These initial regions hold a combined value of over US$25 billion. The startup plans to grow its production capacity to 120,000 liters annually by 2034.
🤝 Team
- Viknish Krishnan-Kutty. Founder and CEO. He has a background in bioengineering and entrepreneurship, with a focus on developing sustainable biotechnology solutions.
- Srinivas Ramasamy. CTO. He has over 20 years of experience in molecular biology, immunology, and clinical research.
- Arjita Nanda. Regulatory Affairs and Business Development Executive. She has a background in pharmaceutical sciences and experience in regulatory affairs and business development.
🚀 Traction
- Moved operations into a commercial laboratory in Singapore.
- Secured product orders from clients in India and Singapore.
- Currently executing a US$1 million pilot order for the Booster serum.
- Matched or outperformed FBS in 12 independent scientific studies.
🏆 Competition
Thermo Fisher and Merck sell FBS and serum-free media. Their products remain animal-derived or synthetic with distinct batch variability. CellCrine offers a costly, difficult-to-scale human platelet lysate serum replacement. PeproTech and STEMCELL sell growth factors as components rather than full replacements.
💰 Financials
🚩 Risks
