Vow co-founder and CEO, George Peppou has stepped down as CEO but will remain with the cultivated meat company as an executive director. The new CEO is Alex Andrews, who joined the company as chief of staff at the beginning of the year.
According to Green Queen, Peppou is heading up a new start-up that has been spun out of Vow. In a statement to Forbes Australia, Peppou said, “Last year Vow had a massive breakthrough on production scale and economics – now by far world-leading in low-cost cell culture.
“As a result of this we have lots of new opportunities outside of food. I and a small team have spun out to a new company focused on one of these.
“Alex and I worked brilliantly together when she was my chief of staff, and I have asked her to step into the CEO role to grow multiple new verticals.”
Peppou and Tim Noakesmith founded Vow in 2019. Peppou came from Sydney start-up accelerator Cicada Innovations and Noakesmith was a former design lead at hearing implant company Cochlear.
Their first result was a world first, cell-cultured kangaroo meat grown from stem cells, the first food product made from the cells of an undomesticated animal. It earned the company a $25,000 Minimum Viable Product grant from the New South Wales Government.
The company set out to do something its overseas rivals were not. Rather than recreate beef or chicken, it would build what it called a “Noah’s Ark” cell library and invent entirely new meats from animals such as kangaroo, alpaca and water buffalo.
In early 2021, it raised $7.7 million (US$6 million) in a seed round led by Square Peg Capital, with Blackbird Ventures and Grok Ventures, the investment office of Mike and Annie Cannon-Brookes, among the backers. Square Peg’s James Tynan, who joined the board, said the team had the most audacious vision he had seen for the future of food. By then the cell library had grown to 11 animals, six of which were plated in a demonstration with chef Neil Perry.
Scale came next. In October 2022, Vow opened Factory 1 in Sydney, billed as the largest cultured meat facility in the Southern Hemisphere with capacity for 30 tonnes a year, built around a 2000 litre cultivator vessel.
Within weeks the company raised US$49.2 million in a Series A round co-led by Blackbird and Prosperity7 Ventures, the growth fund of Aramco Ventures, with Toyota Ventures, Square Peg, Grok and others participating. Plans for a far larger Factory 2, around 100 times the scale of the first, were already advanced.
In February 2023, Vow lodged the first cell-cultured food application ever assessed by Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ), seeking approval for cultured Japanese quail. The same year, Vow captured global attention with the Mammoth Meatball, the first meat grown using an extinct animal’s DNA, to start a conversation about future food systems.
The following year, on Vow’s fifth birthday, the company sold cultured meat for the first time, becoming only the third company in the world to do so. It launched its consumer brand, Forged, and an “entirely new animal” called Quailia, a flavour-led twist on the Japanese quail. Peppou noted the company had reached market in roughly half the time and on less than 10 per cent of the capital of the two firms that preceded it.
Home approval followed in June 2025, when FSANZ cleared Vow’s cultured quail as a novel food ingredient, making Australia and New Zealand the fourth jurisdiction globally to permit cultured meat sales, after Singapore, Israel and the United States. The decision capped a process that ran more than two years and two rounds of public consultation. Vow’s range by then included parfait, foie gras and tallow, and the company had begun direct-to-consumer sales for delivery across Greater Sydney.
