Start-up Talk by Dr Risto Martin, CEO and Founder of KalvoTech

Dr Risto Martin is the Founder and CEO of KalvoTech, a biotech company developing the world's foremost edible hollow fibre membrane bioreactors for structured cultivated meat production. A chemical engineer by training, Risto holds a DPhil in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford and an MSc in Advanced Chemical Engineering with Biotechnology from Imperial College London, where he worked on hollow fibre membrane technologies for red blood cell production. At Oxford, he developed vascular-inspired bioreactor platforms and worked on mathematical modelling of biological systems.

Risto founded KalvoTech after recognising a fundamental flaw at the heart of the cultivated meat industry: stirred tank reactors designed for pharmaceuticals do not produce structured meat with genuine meat texture and appearance. KalvoTech's Prokitein™ platform addresses this by achieving tissue-level cell densities to produce fillets of structured meat directly within the reactor, eliminating costly downstream processing.

Based at Harwell Campus in Oxfordshire, KalvoTech is advancing its platform toward commercial scale.