$125 Million for Psychedelics, The Lunar Gold Rush, and China's First Lab Grown Meat Factory

Psychedelic Biotech Lands $125 Million for Psilocybin Clinical Trials

COMPASS Pathways, widely considered the most advanced publicly-traded psychedelic medicine company, announced they have raised $125 million in new capital to fund the development of their clinical trials, which include a Phase 3 programme for Treatment-Resistant Depression.

Mining’s Next Frontier: The Moon

The big players in mining and rare earth metals have their eyes on a new destination: space. Being referred to in the industry by as the “lunar gold rush” the concept of mining in space is coming in to focus, as it is believed that there are a number of valuable resources to pursue, including Helium-3.

China’s First Ever Cultivated Meat Factory Has Arrived

CellX, a Chinese based biotech startup that has raised $20 million in funding to date, has begun operations at their state-of-the-art cultivated meat production factory. They claim the factory has an eventual capacity of approximately 1,000 tonnes of meat per year, and have been working with regulatory agencies in the United States and Singapore (which have both approved cultivated meat for human consumption) as well as Germany and China to commercialize their product.

The Sprint

• Serve Robotics, a San Francisco based robotics and autonomous delivery company, raised $30 million from Uber, NVIDIA, and Wavemaker Partners. They plan to use the funds to support deployment of up to 2,000 new AI-powered sidewalk delivery robots in the US and beyond.
  

• OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, made their first major acquisition, buying digital products company Global Illumination. The company had most recently launched an online multiplayer game. Terms of the deal were not made public.
  

• Dinari, a blockchain-powered stock trading startup that creates ‘Securities Backed Tokens’ (referred to as dShares), raised $7.5 million in seed funding from Third Kind Venture Capital, SPEILLLP, 500 Global, Balaji Srinivasan, Sancus Ventures and Version One VC.
  

• EDAC Labs, a Maryland-based decarbonisation technology startup working to enable carbon-negative mining, raised $3 million in seed funding from the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment and angel investors. The funding will enable the company to scale and demonstrate its technology at one ton per day of carbon dioxide capture by the end of 2024.