Peter Thiel's Breakout Labs funds artificial meat, cell-tracking companies in latest round

Peter Thiel.

A startup using tissue engineering to develop an edible cured meat, and another company whose technology could more easily track stem cells as they make their way through the body, won grants from a foundation started by entrepreneur Peter Thiel. The grants to the two Peninsula companies and a company from Huntsville, Ala., whose nano technology could help diagnose diseases from a single sample, compose the second round of funding from the San Francisco-based Thiel Foundation’s Breakout Labs. The awards of up to $350,000 each are aimed at helping startups get to a proof of concept that enables them to woo venture capital and other sources of capital.