Impossible Foods raises $75M to race its plant burger into grocery stores

Impossible Foods is a Redwood City company that makes plant-based meat engineered to replace animal products; its burger uses soy leghemoglobin, a plant protein carrying heme, the iron-containing molecule that gives meat its taste and occurs naturally in every animal and plant. Founded by Patrick Brown around 2011 — six years old in 2017 — it was betting that meat-eaters would switch to plants if the burger truly tasted like beef, and that the way to win was biochemistry, not a veggie patty.

In May 2017 Impossible opened an Oakland factory where it expected to produce 1 million pounds of ground plant meat a month, because the burger was still sold only in select restaurants. Late in July it quietly announced a $75 million round led by Temasek, with Open Philanthropy and earlier investors including Bill Gates, Khosla Ventures and Horizon Ventures; TechCrunch reported on 2017-08-01 that total funding had reached nearly $300 million, with earlier rounds including GV, Viking Global Investors and UBS.

The money funded a race into grocery. Beyond Meat — another Bill Gates-backed plant-protein company — was already in hundreds of Whole Foods and Safeway locations and launching into more than 600 Kroger stores across 13 states, while Impossible's burgers remained restaurant-only. The company said it wanted to replace a number of animal products with goods engineered from plants, but for now the focus was squarely on getting more burgers into the world.