Cellular Agriculture Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

We build software to manage, analyze, and optimize bioprocessing data. Our initial customers are bio-industrial companies, who produce various products in bioreactors.

Brown Foods is a Stanford, Rice University and IIT Delhi alumni venture creating UnReal Milk - 'real milk' made using mammalian cell culture, AI enabled. They are the world's 1st company to produce cow-free whole milk in lab (Forbes). Targeting the $700 billion dairy market and $22 billion alternate dairy market with UnReal Milk - which could be converted into butter, cheese, ice-creams etc. and has taste and texture exactly like conventional dairy - unlike any of the plant based milks like oat milk or soy milk. Also, no animal cruelty and 82% lower carbon foot-print! Using the same technology, they have also created real human milk targeting the $80 billion infant formula market. And who knows if adults also start drinking human milk in future!

CB Therapeutics is a synthetic biology company focused on bringing cannabinoid and tryptamine therapeutics to the clinic and commercial markets to treat depression, PTSD, opioid addiction, alcoholism, pain, and other mental health problems.

Culture Biosciences grows cells for biotech companies. Our customers genetically modify organisms to produce new therapeutics, materials, fuels and foods. We help them quickly run experiments and develop manufacturing processes so they can get their products to market faster. We've built proprietary software and automation systems to make operating our bioreactors more efficient than existing systems. We also provide customers with new software tools that help them analyze and contextualize their data. We are currently serving a number of biotech customers and scaling out our infrastructure.

Tule helps farmers make irrigation decisions. Using UC Davis research-based technology, our hardware sensor provides growers with field-scale crop water use measurements (i.e., actual evapotranspiration), crop water stress measurements, applied irrigation measurements, and irrigation recommendations. Using the latest AI technology and our unprecedented crop water stress dataset, our latest product, Tule Vision, provides growers with the water stress of their plants just by taking a picture with their mobile phone.