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, a new backer, led the round, according to a statement from the company. Existing investors, including and , also participated. The last time Impossible Foods raised money was in May 2019, when it pulled $300 million for its Series E round.

The new round will be used to invest in research, scale up manufacturing, grow the company’s retail presence and presence in certain international markets, and popularize its pork and sausage products.

“Our mission is to replace the world’s most destructive technology–the use of animals in food production–by 2035,” CEO Patrick Brown said in a statement. “To do that, we need to double production every year, on average, for 15 years and double down on research and innovation. The market has its ups and downs, but the global demand for food is always there, and the urgency of our mission only grows.”

Impossible Foods competes in the plant-based alternative food space, which is growing in popularity. Impossible Burgers can be found at restaurants across the country, including at more than 7,000 Burger King locations. , which was well-received by investors when it went public last year, is the other well-known brand in the space.

Impossible Foods closed the Series F round last week amid the coronavirus pandemic, the company said. That’s a good thing, because stocks have been plunging and some investors have been cautioning that VC funding will slow down.

At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in October, Impossible Foods’ Brown said the company would look to raise more money and that it wouldn’t go public in the near future, and it appears to be sticking to that plan.

“With this latest round of fundraising, Impossible Foods has the resources to accelerate growth–and continue to thrive in a volatile macroeconomic environment, including the current COVID-19 pandemic,” Impossible Foods’ Chief Financial Officer David Lee said in a statement.

A slew of celebrities also participated in Impossible Foods’ latest round. Musical artists Jay-Z, will.i.am, Zedd, Jaden Smith and Katy Perry all participated, as did actress Mindy Kaling, The Daily Show host Trevor Noah, actor Kal Penn, tennis champion Serena Williams and co-founder Alexis Ohanian, among other stars.

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�մǻ岹��’s newsletter had an interesting tidbit about and ’s stock:

“Grubhub shares tanked over 43 percent following an alarming earnings report late Monday. Beyond Meat stock also had a terrible day, falling more than 22 percent. Not a coincidence: A restriction on selling stock lifted yesterday.”

This afternoon we’re focused on what’s going on with Beyond Meat. What happened to GrubHub is interesting, but what’s going on with everyone’s favorite fake meat company is illustrative of something we need to keep an eye on.

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A 22 percent fall is a significant dip, one that can be at least partially attributed to Beyond Meat’s early shareholders selling their shares now that they’re allowed to. In other words, its lock-up period expired.

What Is a Lock-Up Period?

A restriction on selling stock is known as a lockup period, or a period of time during which employees, founders or other people who owned shares of the stock before it went public can’t sell those shares.

According to , lock-up periods usually last between 90 and 180 days after a company’s IPO, and they exist to prevent investors from flooding the market with lots of shares, which could make the stock’s price sink. Also, if investors immediately started selling their shares when a company goes public, the optics of that would be poor–it could look like employees and investors are cutting their losses early, and that could affect the stock price.

To be clear, lock-up periods are good in that they try to keep the market fair and prevent early disruption to a stock. But when they lift, we can learn about how insiders feel about the company in question; if they dump their stock, depressing its value, that’s a data point.

2019: The Year of the Unicorn

This year has been a landmark year for unicorns going public. We’ve seen well-known startups like , , and enter the public markets. For the companies whose lock-up periods haven’t expired yet, it’ll be interesting to see what happens when the trading restriction is lifted.

Take Uber for example. The company had a disappointing IPO in May, when its stock opened its first day of trading at $42 per share, lower than its IPO price of $45 per share. It closed its first day of trading at $41.57, and its stock has been a bit of a buzzkill since then–it was trading at $33.75 at the end of trading today.

Uber’s lock-up period ends on November 6. The lock-up period expiration will either cause a flood of employee and investor-owned shares hitting the market or perhaps a much-needed bump for its stock. While Uber’s stock performance hasn’t been great, it’s worth noting that Lyft shares went higher on the day its lock-up period expired, the opposite of what analysts expected, according to .

We’re interested in seeing what happens when a few other companies’ lock-up periods end: Peloton (March 24, 2020), SmileDirectClub (March 10, 2020), and Chewy (December 11, 2019). Check back for more.

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The startup’s major competitor went public earlier this year and the demand for plant-based food is growing.

Beyond Meat’s stock has soared on the stock market. The company priced its shares at $25, and its stock closed 163 percent higher on its first day of trading. Beyond Meat was trading at $146.29 around midday Thursday. Its IPO was wildly successful, and shows the market has a hunger for plant-based alternatives.

But still, Impossible Foods CEO Patrick Brown said Wednesday that going public isn’t in the cards for the company in the near future.

“At this point it’s not something that we need and we can take our time,” Brown said at TechCrunch’s annual Disrupt conference.

Impossible Foods has raised in total funding and its investors include and . The company last raised its $300 million in May.

It’s a little odd that the company wants to raise more privately when it appears well-funded and raised money just a few months ago. But more cash could help it scale, develop new products (Brown mentioned that Impossible Foods has made a steak prototype, but it’s not trying to scale it) and beef up before exploring an IPO.

The Hunger For Plant-based Alternatives

Plant-based meat alternatives have gained popularity in recent years, with more and more restaurants adopting these options for their menus. Impossible Foods partnered with Burger King to create the Impossible Whopper and McDonald is partnering with Beyond Meat for its new PLT burger in Canada.

Brown waved away the idea of competing with other plant-based meat alternatives, saying he was primarily concerned with with beef producers.

“We’re not trying to outperform veggie burgers, we’re trying to outperform the cow,” he said.

Brown focused on the environmental issues that come with raising cows for food — think greenhouse gases, land use, and water consumption. All heavy topics to digest.

Photo credit: Alex Wilhelm

announced today that it has closed an oversubscribed fund to invest in plant-based food technology companies. The fund, the firm’s second, totals $165 million dollars and has already invested in two companies: wellness shots startup , and plant-based nutrition company .

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, a partner at the fund and co-founder of , said PowerPlant doesn’t like using the word vegan to describe itself.

“[We are] about businesses that are more plant-centric, and advancing more of a plant-centric world,” he said. The “inhumane and unsustainable” reality of modern food management can only be solved through plant-centric companies, he said.

The firm plans to lead or co-lead Series A and Series B rounds in the space with check size ranging between $4 million to $8 million dollars. He added that the firm will reserve money for follow-on rounds. This new found is almost four times larger than , which was $42 million dollars and has been full deployed.

Previously, PowerPlant invested in recently-public , as well as startups , , among others. as a growth equity firm that provides capital, guidance and operating expertise to “disruptive plant-centric brands.”

The alternative meat space has been sizzling for quite some time now. In May, Impossible Foods raised $300 million in funding for its plant-based burger. And, as mentioned, Beyond Meat had a strong debut as a public company, and is currently valued at $12 billion, . In Boston, a city known for its biotech scene, the largest recent funding rounds went to food tech companies, not life science startups.

Even products drawn from animals, like milk for example, are undergoing innovation from upstarts across the world. Oat milk, for example, is being branded a cow milk alternative. Sweden’s , one of the more popular oat milk brands, caught on in the United States . Oatly, at one point was so high in demand that its . Other brands tackling oat milk include and .

One almond milk startup, , said it isn’t rushing into starting a line of oat milk . With an uptick of interest comes a reminder that new territory has room for risk.

PowerPlant’s Gluck says there’s a lot of funds that are writing smaller checks in early stage food companies, like , and . And there are larger funds too like , and . He sees PowerPlant Ventures “playing at a stage where there is a lack of capital for Series A and B, and add value.”

I’ll leave you with an anecdote. I’m the token vegetarian among carnivorous friends and family, often. But, time and time again, when they try Impossible Meat whether in or burger form, there’s a wince, and soon after, a white flag that “it’s not so bad after all.”

I see alternative protein popping up in a range of establishments from fancy restaurants to the Burger King down the street. So it makes sense that firms like PowerPlant are there on the sidelines to capitalize on the potential of changing taste buds.

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Shares of the Los Angeles-based maker of plant-based meat closed up a staggering 163 percent at $65.75 on Thursday (trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol: BYND) after pricing at the high end of its offering range. As of this morning, Beyond Meat is valued at a staggering $3.9 billion. This is a company that recorded a net loss of nearly $30 million in 2018 despite more than doubling its revenue to just under $88 million, as we reported yesterday.

Beyond Meat’s stock had climbed as high as $74 on Thursday, and as of this morning was trading at $68.19. Previously, the company had raised over its lifetime from backers including , , , Tyson Foods, and others.

So, what does this mean exactly? Fundamentally that Beyond Meat is receiving an even warmer reception from Wall Street than we expected. It is now trading higher than ride-hailing giant ($60.60) and ($47.43), which helps companies monitor their IT infrastructure. 

Indeed, the scale of reception is slightly puzzling. Not that Beyond Meat isn’t doing important work, or that climate change isn’t something that meat consumption doesn’t impact. But it can be hard to fathom the connection between its current value, and the firm’s stock performance to-date.

Indeed, this morning Beyond Meat is currently worth $4.0 billion, a slight uptick from its first-day performance. That gives it a 227.6x multiple on . That figure is slightly exaggerated by the fact that the company has low gross margins (about 20 percent in 2018), making its gross profit multiple more dramatic than you might presume from a flat revenue multiple.

But that’s the point, isn’t it?

Given the odd metrics, we can infer that investors aren’t valuing Beyond Meant today on past performance, or even what it might get done this year. Instead, the public market is valuing the recent IPO a bit like the venture classes might a private company; on potential instead of results. Fair enough, but keep in mind that no bull market lasts forever, and the more gross profit the better.

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The Los Angeles-based company it priced its IPO at $25, offering 9.625 million shares, which will trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol BYND. The terms of the IPO include a 30-day option for Beyond Meat’s underwriters (including Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Credit Suisse) to purchase an additional 1,443,750 shares at the IPO price. The listing values the company based on its number of outstanding shares, according to a regulatory filing as cited by MSN.

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Beyond Meat priced at the top of its expected offer range of between $23 and $25, which was increased from a previously set range of between $19 and $21 per share. 

, a vegan, founded Beyond Meat in 2009 as an alternative to animal-derived meat. The company touts that its burgers use “99 percent less water, 93 percent less land, 90 percent fewer GHGE (greenhouse gas emissions), and 46 percent less energy.”

Beyond Meat previously raised over its lifetime from backers including , , , Tyson Foods, and others.

Beyond Meat’s S-1 details a company quickly growing, but unable to convert that growth into profits, at least so far. Between 2016 and 2017, Beyond Meat effectively doubled its revenue from just over $16 million to $32.6 million. The company more than doubled between 2017 and 2018, expanding its top line to just under $88 million.

Over the same periods, Beyond Meat’s net margin has improved; the firm is losing less money as a percent of its revenue over time, something that investors look for in growth-oriented companies. But its losses in dollar-terms are somewhat flat. Beyond Meat had a net loss of $30.4 million in 2017. That figure fell only slightly to $29.9 million in 2018.

Those results make Beyond Meat the stuff the venture scene hungers after. However, the company’s history of gross losses – when a firm’s revenue cannot cover its own costs, let alone finance the company’s operating expenses – in both 2016 and 2017 paint a different picture. The software companies of the world chasing Beyond Meat’s ability to double and double again are accreting far more profitable revenue.

Regardless, at the top of its range Beyond Meat is enjoying a warm welcome from Wall Street. If you’re wondering why we’re covering a plant-based meat (i.e. not a traditional tech) company in the first place, check out Alex’s piece from last week.

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