Off the Hook

The world could use more fish — but it isn’t getting any more oceans. Entrepreneur Doug Grant (MBA’16) thinks cultivated seafood could offer the answer.

Doug Grant was holding a revolution in a styrofoam cooler. It was April 2024, and he was on a train, transporting a sample of cultivated black sea bass meat from the lab space of his startup, Atlantic Fish, in Raleigh, North Carolina, to the NC Food Innovation lab in Kannapolis, NC, where this culmination of years of cutting-edge research would be formed into breaded nuggets. 

The first taste, says Grant, wasn’t a loud celebration but quiet meditation. He had talked about this idea in the abstract for years, and now it was real. He slowed down to take in the moment. It was a huge milestone for him, for the company, and a step forward in radically reshaping how the world eats. 

His route to that revolutionary meal was circuitous. As an undergrad, he set his sights on becoming an astronaut and began working towards a Ph.D. focused on the geology of Mars. “There are kind of two tracks to becoming an astronaut: there’s the science route and then there’s the pilot route,” says Grant. 

He ultimately chose the latter, dropping the doctorate plans and joining the Navy, where he served as a helicopter pilot for a decade. But he wasn’t able to make test pilot school—which he understood to be a necessary (albeit exclusive) precursor to NASA. “I wasn’t in that 1%,” says Grant. He was at a crossroads. Then one day, in 2013, he saw an ad in the Metro for Georgetown’s McDonough School of  Business, with a man holding an earth in the palm of his hand. “The tagline was, ‘Somewhere a business is going to waste,’” Grant recalls.

Grant was immediately drawn to entrepreneurship. It just felt right. After he landed his last-ever helicopter flight for the Navy in late 2012, he patted the side of the helicopter. “Okay,” he thought. “Time to find the next thing.” And that thing had to offer a similar thrill. “I just didn’t think that anything else could be as exciting or comparable to flying as starting your own company,” says Grant.

His first startup was a bone marrow donor registry aimed at addressing a critical shortage of donors. While the company ultimately didn’t succeed, it taught Grant valuable lessons about the importance of market size and personal fit. “You have to be able to answer the question, ‘Why you?’” he says. “Why are you the one to start this business?” 

In 2019, Grant read an excerpt from Amanda Little’s “The Fate of Food” in Rolling Stone that detailed a startup pursuing a cultivated duck breast. He tucked the idea away. Then, during COVID, he read Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World by Paul Shapiro, which considered the prospect of cultivated meat from a climate angle. He was hooked. Determined to learn more, in 2020 he launched a podcast, Brave New Meat, where he talked to experts and entrepreneurs at the forefront of the cultivated meat movement—including Clean Meat co-author Shapiro as his first guest.  

As he began to understand the wider industry through those conversations, he discovered an incredible opportunity for impact in cultivated seafood. “Generally, about 50% of the fish we eat comes from aquaculture and 50% from wild-caught,” says Grant. “But the problem with the wild-caught is that we can’t make more oceans. Something like 80 to 90% of our fisheries are either overfished or harvested at max capacity. And when you tack on the population growth on top of that… well, we know it’s only going to get worse, and we just don’t have other means of producing those proteins.”

The mission also was becoming personal. Grant had grown up hunting in Mississippi, and spent most of his life as a “committed carnivore.” 

“I really had a crisis of conscience,” says Grant, who is now what he calls an “aspirational vegan.” “I felt like this was something really core to my identity. And whatever happens with this, I’m going to work in this industry for the rest of my life. This is my thing,” says Grant. 

He had his answer to the “why you?” question. “And I was all in.” 

In 2022, with a business plan in place, he officially launched Atlantic Fish with Trevor Ham, a Duke postdoc researcher focused on cell agriculture, who became the company’s chief science officer. Grant once again was ready to take flight. 

The first building blocks of cultivated fish come from a biopsy. You take a sample of cells from an existing fish—Grant chose black sea bass, a relatively expensive fish without much competition from aquaculture—and grow them in a giant metal fermentation tank, like the kind you might see at a brewery. The cells grow in a liquid broth of salts, amino acids, and other nutrients that would normally help them grow inside the fish. “It’s real fish,” says Grant. “It’s just made in a different way—and you’re really starting at the smallest scale.”

That broth—technically termed growth media—and the large fermentation tanks are the largest cost drivers of the business, Grant says. “We need the media to get down to about a dollar per liter, which will translate to the product being $20 per pound,” he says. And he needs bigger tanks, too. “We need to be able to grow this at a large scale and in sufficient densities that the bioprocess makes sense from an economic perspective.” In other words: “More cells, growing quickly, in big volumes, with cheaper inputs.” 

If Atlantic Fish were to add, say, three or four 20,000-liter systems to its arsenal, he notes, it could potentially produce a million pounds of product annually. Which sounds like a massive amount of protein, but it’s still an infinitesimal percentage of the $400 billion annual global seafood market. “It’s a massive, massive market,” says Grant. 

The opportunity to claim some portion of a market of that size will naturally attract capital. Atlantic Fish, which now has five employees, has received grants from the likes of the USDA as well as loans and investments from groups like NC IDEA, a private foundation supporting the state’s entrepreneurial community, and Sustainable Food Ventures, an early-stage startup funder. 

“But federal funding and venture capital are two really, really different segments,” says Grant. The federal agencies are interested in the science, armed with questions about technical milestones and research. “The investors, on the other hand, really just want to know is the business case there—and can you really pull it off? Can your technology actually get to price parity? What does scaling up actually look like? How quickly can you do this? How much capital are you going to have to raise?” 

The industry has had some notable success on the fundraising front. Upside Foods, who Grant first encountered in that influential Rolling Stone article, has raised over $600 million, and several others have raised north of $100 million. “Those have been really trailblazing companies that we’ve learned a lot from, and we’re benefiting from a lot of the stuff that they’ve done—from both improving the industry’s technology to getting through regulations,” he notes. 

But investors, says Grant, want to start seeing companies get real products onto the plates of consumers. “You have to be able to say, ‘Hey, we can make this at production scale. We can sell it, there’s a demand for it, there’s a market, we’ve got the technology, we know how to do it,” says Grant. “That’s when you start to get the big corporate meat and seafood companies involved in this, and that’s how you really scale this up.” And when you get those big, multinational conglomerates involved, it forces a larger culture shift. “It changes how we all think about food, right?”

It’s the kind of potential revolution that Grant envisioned; it’s the rocketship he always wanted. 

He balances this passion with pragmatism, says cofounder Ham. “He’s really good at building a real business in a field where a lot of people are trying to build aspirational businesses. I’m not interested in pitching some pie-in-the sky, 50-year plan. I want to pitch a company that I think can make a product that I believe we can make, that I believe we can sell, and that can happen in a real timeframe. And Doug is really good at that.” 

He also has an uncanny tolerance for the grind. “I’ve known a lot of CEOs of startups who aren’t really willing to do the boring, difficult work to fundraise, to do business development, to meet customers,” Ham says. “They only want to fundraise from the biggest venture capital firms, and they only want to get huge multimillion dollar checks. They’re not willing to accept that sometimes you just have to go out and talk to 250 different people to get five of them to give you money. That is the kind of work that distinguishes good startups from failed startups.” 

As grounded as he may be in the realities of the business, Grant can still storytell like a visionary. He reflects, for instance, on how he sees fewer coral reefs today when he scuba dives than when he dove as a kid, and wonders how much irreparable damage already has been done. “We’re just trawling the ocean floor and destroying these ecosystems,” says Grant, gathering steam. And he’s not just animated by the environmental protection aspect. There are also the positive outcomes for climate change, animal welfare, and food security. 

“Utopia is too strong of a word,” says Grant. “But I can see a much, much better world if we just solve for our protein problems.”

This story was originally featured in the Georgetown Business Spring 2025 Magazine. Download the Georgetown Business Audio app to listen to the stories and other bonus content.