Plant-based meat company Impossible Foods has picked up $200 million in Series G funding, building on its rapid growth over the past few months.
This round will go almost entirely to research and development and increasing capacity for the Silicon Valley-based company.
"We've seen unprecedented demand, something like a 60x increase in our grocery business alone, which means we're keeping pace by raising capital with long-term investors," CFO David Lee told Cheddar.
This latest round of investment marks another milestone in a busy summer for the startup. On June 23, it rolled out its Impossible Breakfast Sandwich at Starbucks locations nationwide. A week later, it put its products into Walmart stores across the country.
"Nine out of 10 of our customers are self-avowed meat eaters," Lee said. "It means we have to go where meat-eaters buy meat, and increasingly during the shelter-in-place environment we're seeing more and more meat consumed from purchases at grocery stores or direct-to-consumer."
Impossible Foods launched its own direct-to-consumer business, which Lee said is seeing 95 percent retention of new customers.
The company also announced that it's collaborating with the quarterback and activist Colin Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp to help improve food security for Black and Brown communities in Los Angeles and New York.
The company is supplying its plant-based products at community events organized by the organization.
"In this time of this global pandemic, it's important for us at Impossible Foods that we do social good beyond the mission of the company," Lee said.
In addition to partnering with Kaepernick, Lee added that Impossible Foods has served more than 750,000 people who have experienced food insecurity in the U.S. since the start of the pandemic.
President Donald Trump is talking up a joint venture investing up to $500 billion for infrastructure tied to artificial intelligence by a new partnership formed by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank. The new entity, Stargate, will start building out data centers and the electricity generation needed for the further development of the fast-evolving AI in Texas, according to the White House. The initial investment is expected to be $100 billion and could reach five times that sum. While Trump has seized on similar announcements to show that his presidency is boosting the economy, there were already expectations of a massive buildout of data centers and electricity plants needed for the development of AI.
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