Inside the stunning collapse of Believer Meats, the $600 million lab-grown meat startup 

Last month, Believer Meats was basking in acclaim.

The startup had just secured final U.S. government approval for what it billed as Earth’s largest cultivated-meat facility, a $125 million complex near Raleigh, North Carolina.

Boosters hailed the plant’s role in strengthening U.S. competitiveness in the race to grow meat from cells—a sector long dominated by Israel. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) called it “a major economic win for the state and region.” Believer Meats CEO Gustavo Burger said he was thrilled about the facility’s opening, calling it a “major milestone” that would redefine the future of food. “Boom,” he wrote on LinkedIn, announcing that the company was set to begin commercial production of its flagship lab-grown chicken. “Here’s to the next chapter!”

That chapter lasted roughly two weeks.

Today, the 200,000-square-foot facility’s fancy bioreactors and centrifuges sit quiet. In an all-hands meeting over Microsoft Teams on December 1, a tearful Burger informed staff that Believer was ceasing operations and laying everybody off. “The worst day of my career,” he told employees, according to people on the call who spoke with me under anonymity so as not to harm their future work prospects.

A major financial backer had pulled out, leaving management scurrying to secure a last-ditch loan, which was also denied. The startup, valued at $600 million in 2021, would be closing shop before putting a single lab-grown chicken strip into a consumer’s hand. It had just posted an ad for a new plant manager.

It is a stunning collapse for one of the sector’s most promising players. Founded by Hebrew University biomedical engineer Yaakov Nahmias, Believer rose on the promise of being the first company to turn cell-based meat into a low-cost commodity. By 2021, it had raised $347 million from giants like Archer-Daniels-Midland and Tyson Foods.

After opening what it called the world’s first commercial cultured-meat factory in Rehovot, Israel, close to Tel Aviv, the company began scouting U.S. sites for a far larger facility. Additional money came from the prominent food investment firm S2G Investments; Neto Group, one of Israel’s largest food conglomerates; and Bits x Bites, a Chinese foodtech accelerator. In 2024, Jeff Bezos donated $30 million to help Believer create the North Carolina State University Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein.

This past summer, Believer became the fifth cultured-meat startup to secure a “no questions” safety letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, putting it alongside Upside Foods, cell-based salmon maker Wildtype, Mission Barns (whose pork meatballs just became the first cultured meat sold in U.S. grocery stores), and Eat Just (which five years ago sold the world’s first cultured chicken, in Singapore).

In September, Believer announced that it had completed the plant’s construction. The facility boasted a bioreactor that it said would revolutionize animal biomass in the same way Ford’s assembly line revolutionized automobiles. For phase one of operations, the plant would be able to produce 21 million pounds of chicken per year, at a cost of $8.50 to $10 a pound.

“Hundreds of thousands of people could potentially try it,” Believer’s chief product and growth officer Heather Hudson said, “making it more accessible not just for a certain demographic, but for most people.” Capacity was designed to double, eventually, to 42 million pounds, and Believer claimed that a price point of under $7 per pound was in view.

Believer Meats comes to an end

The alternative meat protein industry has long operated in a Silicon Valley–style reality distortion field, one that ignores the stubborn physics of the real world. Eat Just founder Josh Tetrick, who built the eggless mayonnaise brand Just Mayo, told Better Meat Co. founder Paul Shapiro, for his 2018 best-selling book Clean Meat, that Eat Just—Just Mayo’s parent company—would be “the world’s largest meat company” by the year 2030. A think tank predicted that demand for cow products would fall by 70% by that same year.

Believer had made bold statements of its own, particularly about its own success with reducing costs, the biggest hurdle standing in lab-made meat’s way. In 2021, Nahmias noted that Believer was cultivating chicken breast for $7.70 per pound, down from $18 six months earlier—a price decrease that seemed to validate the sector’s meteoric hype. It was a massive improvement from 2013, when a team of scientists led by Mark Post, founder of Leonardo DiCaprio-backed Mosa Meat, served the first cultured burger through the help of an eye-popping $330,000 investment from Google’s Sergey Brin. At the time, Nahmias called Brin’s $330,000 hamburger “probably the silliest idea I’ve ever heard.”

Last month, Nahmias’s lab published a study in Nature Food outlining a new method for dividing cow cells that doesn’t require gene-editing. Estimating that beef produced this way would cost in the range of $7 to $10 per pound, Nahmias declared it “a true ‘eureka’ moment,” overturning decades of assumptions about bovine cell biology.

Believer ran out of cash two weeks later. According to insiders, the company is currently seeking a buyer or some alternative structure that would allow the business to continue in some form. It’s unclear whether any top-level executives remain. But some people in senior management, like Hudson, reportedly left Believer just weeks before the layoffs.

Believer employees were not offered severance. Worse, the final pay period passed without them receiving paychecks. By law, employers laying off their workforce with a head count of at least 100 must either warn employees 60 days in advance or pay them for 60 additional days.

Interview requests I sent in early December to the Believer communications department and to CEO Burger have gone unreturned, including queries about the company’s actual head count at the time of its collapse. Believer had said the North Carolina facility would employ 100 people, and that additional team members worked from its Chicago headquarters. The company’s LinkedIn page listed the workforce as being between 50 and 200.

Big tours and taste tests

Built by Gray Construction—a firm that has handled warehouses for Mercedes-Benz, Caterpillar, and Walmart—Believer’s North Carolina facility had been in its windup phase, called “commissioning” in industry-speak. Former employees tell me that the target date for shipping the first finished chicken products to Believer’s co-packer had been tentatively set for early spring. The initial customers were going to be wholesale restaurant partners.

But the plant reportedly ran into operational issues. Former employees describe glycol leaks, improperly welded pipes, and cooling problems that delayed the timeline by weeks at a time. Believer reportedly hired an outside contractor to fix issues more quickly. Two sources told me that construction delays were a significant obstacle to progress.

In November, Believer held a town hall meeting during which attendees say executives hinted at financial trouble. A funding round deemed “mission-critical” was underway, they explained; much suddenly seemed to hinge on its success. Former workers say that in recent months, big tours and taste tests had been organized for well-dressed groups of prospective financial suitors.

On December 1, Burger told the staff via Teams that the company was kaput. That evening, an outsider who’d been rooting for the company’s success reached out to me to share that Believer had closed the plant. A few days later, Gray Construction filed a legal complaint demanding $34 million for the outstanding debt that Believer owes for the facility.

The brutal efficiency of the bird

In the meantime, the faucet that practically gushed money has slowed to a drip. According to the alt-protein trade group Good Food Institute, funding to cultivated-meat companies has shrunk from $1.38 billion in 2021 to just $139 million in 2024.

Upside Foods suffered two rounds of layoffs in 2024, and a third major restructuring in March. A decade after also encountering labeling disputes, regulatory setbacks, and other problems with Just Mayo, Eat Just switched the chicken it’s selling in Singapore to a 3% cultivated chicken, 97% plant-based protein hybrid product, and meanwhile got sued for more than $100 million by bioreactor partner ABEC for unpaid bills. ABEC alleges that Eat Just was “woefully undercapitalized from the beginning.” Even Better Meat Co. CEO Shapiro, cultured meat’s most vocal cheerleader, has staked his company’s future not on lab-grown cells, but on a “complete protein” made from mycelium.

Then there is Meati, which by 2025 had secured $400 million in funding and was selling its Alt-Steaks in 7,000 stores nationwide. It was reportedly headed toward bankruptcy by last spring (after a protracted IP dispute, incidentally, with Better Meat Co.). Yasir Abdul—an infomercial entrepreneur who made his fortune selling belts, car dash cams, shoe insoles, and Drain Buddy hair catchers on late-night TV—took control of the company in a fire sale.

In a press release, Abdul asserted that “when startups and founders build a brand, they have tunnel vision,” but Meati would tap into new growth by harnessing the power of direct-to-consumer sales: “As Seen On TV products are available in all major retailers across the world.”

And yet cultured-animal players are hardly the only names struggling in alt-meat. Beyond Meat once traded at $230 a share after its 2019 IPO, with a market cap of $14 billion. This summer, CEO Ethan Brown told me that the company was reorienting the brand to highlight vegetables as pure, clean ingredients instead of existing as a sort of not-meat—to the point of dropping “Meat” from the name. But after reporting a $100 million loss for the third quarter of 2025, Beyond’s stock price slid to less than $1 a share. In June, Impossible Foods CEO Peter McGuinness warned his company was mulling a burger that was half real beef.

For the past decade, the percentage of Americans identifying as vegetarian and vegan largely hasn’t changed. Yet during this same period, spending on plant-based foods doubled—from less than $4 billion in the mid-2010s to more than $8 billion today. The gap is explained by meat eaters behaving like vegans part-time. But this group is less ethically bound to the diet. Externalities like taste, price, and cultural trends can push these consumers back to more conventional meat options. In fact, amid continued inflation, sales of plant-based foods fell in 2024.

Cultured meat, in particular, is crashing into the brutal efficiency of the bird. Chicken is the most common meat to try to cultivate, and the modern broiler chicken is the cheapest form of animal muscle meat. Disrupters like Believer are asking consumers to pay $8 per pound for a product that tastes and looks different, while a rotisserie chicken at Costco costs $4.99.

Meanwhile, mainstream consumers are pursuing “natural” products more than ever. Food has landed in the crosshairs of a growing cultural pushback against artificial slop. Products that veer into an uncanny valley of food are therefore at a special risk.

Impossible Foods CEO McGuinness captured this well at October’s World Economy Summit in Washington, D.C. He acknowledged that the industry’s high-concept pitch was becoming a losing proposition and recast the sector’s origins as a tactical error. “People don’t want to eat tech food or climate food—they just want to eat delicious, nutritious food,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to get back to.”