Sacramento is better known for politics, farm country, and a basketball team that hasn’t stopped hustling since the Bibby days. But now it’s home to a company putting steakhouse flavor into fermentation tanks. The Better Meat Co. just locked in a $31M Series A, led by Future Ventures and Resilience Reserve, with Epic Ventures, Sigmas Group, and Hickman’s Family Farms CEO Glenn Hickman stepping up. Add Watershed Ventures and BIRD Foundation into the mix, and you’ve got a cap table that reads like a greatest hits record of capital and credibility.
What’s driving the interest? Rhiza mycoprotein, a whole-biomass ingredient brewed from Neurospora crassa through continuous fermentation. It delivers nearly 50% protein by dry weight, rich fiber and potassium, zero cholesterol, and digestibility scores pushing 0.96. More importantly, it checks the boxes the industry keeps missing: sustainable, scalable, and cost-competitive. A 17-hour fermentation cycle turns raw inputs like corndextrose, potato peelings, and spent grains into a versatile ingredient that blends seamlessly into meat, dairy alternatives, baked goods, and hybrid products. No extraction. No gimmicks. Just yield, speed, and flavor.
Paul Shapiro, co-founder and CEO, took his background as a bestselling author and longtime advocate for alt proteins and turned it into a commercial engine. Alongside COO Joanna Bromley, who’s running point on operations, finance, and scale, the West Sacramento team already operates a 9,000-liter demo fermenter and is preparing to scale tenfold before contract manufacturing hits 150,000 liters. That’s not just growth, it’s architecture. On the board, Steve Jurvetson of Future Ventures brings his reputation for spotting generational companies, while Glenn Hickman adds real-world ag muscle.
The Better Meat Co. already counts Hormel Foods, Maple Leaf Foods, Perdue Farms, and School Food Enterprises as partners. Regulatory green lights are secured: FDA GRAS status, USDA safe and suitable approval, Singapore clearance. Six patents are issued, with more recently added, underscoring technical depth few others in the fermentation race can claim. When a company can map a path to cost parity with commodity beef by 2026, it stops being a nice idea and starts being a market force.
The lesson here is sharp. Capital at this level doesn’t just chase vision, it rewards execution. Paul Shapiro and Joanna Bromley stacked infrastructure, partnerships, and regulatory wins before chasing massive scale. That’s why this round landed, and why Rhiza is positioned to be more than another protein story. This isn’t the future of food. It’s protein reimagined in real time.
