Can AI take the guesswork out of meat? MEQ Solutions raises $15M to find out — TFN

The global red-meat industry generates more than $ 1 trillion in annual revenue and supports millions of producers, processors, and consumers worldwide. Yet it remains one of the only major industries still reliant on manual inspection and subjective grading, systems that depend on the human eye rather than data.

MEQ Solutions was created to fix that. The company has built a suite of technologies that use imaging and artificial intelligence to assess meat quality and yield in real time, objectively.

Today, the startup has raised $15 million in Series A funding from Insight Partners to accelerate its push toward transforming how meat quality is measured and valued across global supply chains.

Becoming the global authority on objective measurement of meat quality and yield

Remo Carbone founded MEQ Solutions with a small team of physicists, meat scientists, and engineers who wanted to modernise a supply chain that, for decades, had relied mainly on feel and intuition.

Carbone tells TFN, “A deep dive into agriculture showcased the opportunity to build a company where impactful differences could be made and in which there was an industry that was being underserved by the global innovation community.”

MEQ’s platform includes MEQ Probe, MEQ Camera, MEQ Live, and MEQ Insights, technologies that work together to deliver real-time feedback on quality and yield from the paddock to the processing floor. In fact, the company’s MEQ Camera recently became the first video-based system certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for beef grading.

Carbone elaborates, “What sets MEQ Solutions apart is that we are the only company in the world that measures red meat quality and yield end to end, from the live animal right through to the final carcase outcome. Most solutions in the market focus on a single point in the chain. We connect the whole system with the most advanced hardware and software technology.”

He adds, “The real difference is not just measurement, it is actionability. When solutions only operate in one section of the supply chain, they can tell you what happened, but they cannot influence what happens next. Because we link live-animal insight to feedlot decisions and plant-level outcomes, people can actually act on the data upstream to optimise production, protect brand value and lift commercial returns. That is what turns this from a tool into true infrastructure for value creation across the entire supply chain.”

Unlike Marble Technologies and Silver Fern Farms, MEQ stands out for its level of certification, scalability, or supply-chain breadth. Carbone notes, “Most existing solutions focus on a single task, whether that is imaging at the plant, live-animal assessment, genetics, feeding efficiency or reporting. The limitation with those approaches is that they only ever give you a partial view. They might tell you what happened in one place, but they do not give you the full performance story or the ability to act across the entire supply chain.”

What’s next?

With this funding, MEQ plans to expand globally by adding staff, deepening partnerships in Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, and the United States, and moving closer to its goal of becoming the global standard in objective measurement.

Carbone concludes, “We have built a suite of solutions that serve the red meat supply chain, and validated that our approach and solutions deliver material value in major global markets. Our focus in the coming years is to capitalise on the opportunity in front of us, to go deeper with our current partners to support them in an ever more meaningful way and also to extend ourselves to broader parts of the supply chain. “

TFN contacted Carbone for comment regarding diversity and inclusion; no response was received at the time of publication.