The company failed to get the funding it needed to take the material to the next stage.Fashionnetwork.com hasn’t yet been able to get confirmation of the move that was reported by Vogue Business. 

Dan Widmaier, CEO of the California-based materials innovation company, said following Mylo’s launch in 2018 it was “devastatingly close” to commercial scale but had been derailed by inflation and fewer funding opportunities against the weak economic backdrop.He told the publication that Mylo has been “paused” in order to “reassess what works and what will work in the future”.Despite the fashion sector increasingly switching on to leather alternatives made from a variety of materials, the CEO said investor attention has moved on to new areas, such as this year’s ‘big thing’, artificial intelligence.It’s undeniable that since the news flow around ChatGPT earlier this year, AI has been attracting a lot of money and the share prices of stock exchange-listed companies with an AI angle has soared.But leather alternatives are still attracting funding, even if the cash to scale up to full production is hard to come by.In June, Arda Biomaterials said it had received a funding injection as it continued its mission “to transform waste into valuable, animal- and plastic-free leather alternatives”. While Bolt had received total investment of $300 million so far, Ardo is at a much, much earlier stage. It has created leather made from beer waste and has just received £1.1 million of new investment, led by UK clean-tech venture capital fund Clean Growth Fund.Late last year, Danish footwear specialist Ecco also said that its Ecco Leather operation had linked up with Ecovative, a major mycelium technology company. They have an ongoing partnership to develop and commercialise the next generation of mycelium materials for a range of new products.Allbirds has also been using leather alternatives in its shoes. And last year, saw growing interest in real leather but which has been laboratory-grown. American start-up VitroLabs Inc raised $46 million to build and scale the world’s first pilot production of cell-cultivated leather with Kering and Bestseller as two of the investors and partners.