October 8, 2015

Redwood City, California-based Impossible Foods, has raised $108 million in a second round of fundraising led by UBS and including Viking Global Investors, and previous investors, Khosla Ventures, Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, and Horizons Ventures, the investment arm for Hong Kong businessman, Li Ka-shing.

Launched only four years ago by Patrick Brown, who served 25 years as a professor of biochemistry at Stanford, and who was a co-founder of Kite Hill, a nut milk and cheese product company, Impossible Foods is developing a line of ‘next generation’ meat and cheese products made solely from plants, that contain no cholesterol, hormones, or antibiotics. The company’s flagship product is a plant-based, meatless cheeseburger that ‘bleeds its own blood’, through the use of ‘heme’ – a molecule found in certain plants and is also found in hemoglobin.

The main driver and mission behind Impossible Foods, and for many investors that are making commitments to the plant-based food segment, is the development of foods that can better meet the needs of an expanding global population, which is forecast to increase more than three-fold from 3 billion in 1940 to 9.5 billion in 2050.

This past summer, Impossible Foods was reportedly in negotiations with Google about a potential acquisition, according to The Infornation.com. Sources familiar with the talks stated that negotiations fell through when Impossible Foods declared that the offer, which was between $200 million and $300 million undervalued the company.