Impossible Foods

Impossible Foods develops plant-based substitutes for meat and dairy, best known for the Impossible Burger, which uses soy leghemoglobin (heme) to reproduce the flavor of beef. The burger launched in restaurants in 2016 after about five years of research, and the line later expanded to pork, chicken and other products sold through restaurants such as Burger King and through grocery retail. The company was founded in July 2011 by Patrick O. Brown, a Stanford biochemistry professor, who raised $9 million to start it. It is headquartered in Redwood City, California. Peter McGuinness is chief executive, and Dennis Woodside served as president from 2019.

Early backers included Khosla Ventures and Google Ventures. In October 2015 the company raised $108 million led by UBS, with Viking Global Investors, Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates and Horizons Ventures (the vehicle of Li Ka-shing), bringing total funding to $183 million; TechCrunch reported that it had rejected acquisition talks with Google in the $200 million to $300 million range. A further $75 million round closed in August 2017. In April 2018 it raised $114 million led by Temasek and Sailing Capital, taking the total to $372 million. A May 2019 round, with a Form D reporting about $300 million sold, valued the company at $2 billion. In March 2020 it raised $500 million led by Mirae Asset Global Investments, with Khosla, Horizons and Temasek returning, which TechCrunch said brought total funding to $1.3 billion. In August 2020 it raised a further $200 million in an internal round led by existing investor Coatue, and the corresponding Form D reports $200 million sold.

Impossible Foods remains private. Its 2020 fundraising coincided with a sharp scale up, including Burger King's commitment to sell the Impossible Whopper across its roughly 7,000 U.S. restaurants and a quadrupling of output at its Oakland plant. The company has not published revenue figures in the sources reviewed, and no valuation after 2019 was verified. Brown has described the mission as replacing animals in food production by 2035.

For investors, Impossible Foods is a case of deep science funded over many years by a mix of venture firms, sovereign capital and crossover investors. Khosla Ventures entered early, while Temasek, Mirae and Coatue came in at later rounds after the product had reached national distribution. Nearly fifteen years after founding the company has not reached an IPO or sale, which shows the long and capital intensive path of food technology compared with software.