Gourmey, a French startup making lab-grown foie gras
Gourmey is a French startup led by executive chef Nicolas Morin-Forest that is cultivating meat from stem cells. They are starting with a premium of French cuisine, fois gras which has recently been banned in many restaurants worldwide out of concerns for animal cruelty and sutainability, and eventually plan to offer more meat alternatives.
Fois gras is typically made from the fattened livers of ducks or geese. Gourmey is part of a wave of cell-based meat companies like Eat Just, Mosa Meat and Meatable, as compared to the plant-based meat substitute companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat.
They recently raised $10M in a seed financing round lead by Point Nine, a seed-stage venture-capital firm in Berlin, and London-based VC Air Street Capital with Heartcore Capital in Denmark and SF-based Partech.
Great Question is making it easier to integrate customer research into building products
Great Question was a part of Y Combinator’s winter 2021 program and has developed a platform for companies to do customer research into their products. This is notoriously difficult to do at any stage of a company’s lifecycle, and especially so at the early stages when its arguably needed the most.
The platform seems to codify a lot of the essentials into an easy-to-use SaaS and also reminds us of the learnings from the classic book on customer research, The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. The app’s features help to interview customers about product ideas and strategy, find product-market fit, conduct usability studies on UX designs and see how well marketing landing pages perform.
The company recently announced that it has raised $2.5 million in seed funding from Funders Club, January Capital, Nomo VC and Twenty-Two Ventures and was founded by PJ Murray and Ned Dwyer. The founders previously started and sold Elto to GoDaddy in 2015 and said that they didn’t do a lot of formal customer research at Elto which gave them the idea for GQ.
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