SINGAPORE — When it comes to business,"doing good" and"pursuing profits" are sometimes deemed as mutually exclusive goals.
Indeed, some business experts whom TODAY spoke to also agreed that there has been more awareness of environmental and social issues confronting the world as it emerges from the pandemic. While the startup scene is fraught with risks, no matter what the business is, the challenges are especially magnified for enterprises with a focus on “doing good” — where a product or service tied to a humanitarian or environmental cause does not often generate high profit margins, especially in the short term.
Little did he know that decades later, he would be the founder of a startup which developed a solution to accelerate the production of lab-grown meat. Cultivated meat is real meat grown directly from cells taken from animals without having to kill them. Thus, he decided to take the leap and start his own company, Cellivate Technologies, in 2019 to further develop and sell the coating technology and other innovations to companies, locally and abroad, to help speed the production of cultivated meat.Dr Viknish Krishnan-Kutty, the founder of Cellivate Technologies, poses for a photo in the tissue culture lab on Nov 2, 2022.
Although the future held much promise when the firm was set up, Covid-19’s arrival in early 2020 threw a spanner in the works, as almost all economic activity in Singapore and the rest of the world ground to a halt. It was in 2020 that companies from all over the world began making enquiries about his products. A year later, his firm began launching product pilots.“The premise of what we are doing, allowing cells to grow better… the cells produce a certain ingredient that goes into their cosmetics,” Dr Viknish said.
“Like most of these disruptive companies, we are still not profitable, because a lot of the resources are spent in research and development, and the nature of R&D is that it is expensive, because we are doing things that have never been done before,” he said. From 1999 till 2010, he was with the National Environment Agency , rising the ranks to become its deputy director.
🧫 Dr Viknish Krishnan-Kutty left his stable job as a research scientist at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and founded Cellivate Technologies, which developed a solution to accelerate the production of lab-grown meat.
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