Prince Khaled bin Alwaleed’s KBW Ventures joins Black Sheep Foods’ Series A funding round

KBW Ventures has joined several global venture capitalists to invest in Black Sheep Foods, a San Francisco based foodtech startup, in their $12.3 m Series A funding led by plant-based venture companies, Unovis, Bessemer Ventures Partners, and AgFunder, bringing the total investment to $18.05m since the company’s founding in 2019.

This round will help accelerate Black Sheep Foods’ ‘alt-meat’ journey to bring consumers flavour freedom in the meat section, and to scale up production for its debut lamb made from plants for (US) national distribution. With this Series A funding, Black Sheep Foods is primed to bring their lamb made from plants to restaurants across America and unlock new, full fidelity meat flavours for consumers, while removing animals from the equation.

In the Middle East, where consumers are especially discerning about their lamb, Prince Khaled bin Alwaleed, the MENA region’s preeminent greentech investor, founder of KBW Ventures, and early investor in alt-proteins, found the taste to be authentic. He added, “As someone who has grown up with this taste profile, I couldn’t believe the mouthfeel and flavour. With taste being a vital aspect of customer adoption, Black Sheep Foods will easily dominate amongst plant-based meats. Additionally, game meats are still a wide open playing field. There’s a whole range of taste profiles that Black Sheep will be able to explore, especially with the company’s technology, allowing for an amplified flavour, excellent texture, and a strong nutritional profile.”

“Our minds associate meat with a shape, a texture, and a flavour,” says Sunny Kumar, CEO and Cofounder of Black Sheep Foods, “While texture has been the focus of meat innovation, flavour is a white space. Our debut lamb made from plants has more depth of flavour, richness, and appetizing aromatics than other meats, full stop. We’re in the business of giving consumers access to the most delicious meat variety, using plants instead of animals.”

KBW Ventures has a mixture of food technology investments – some plant-based and some cellular agriculture. These include Moku Foods, Eclipse Foods, Rebellyous Foods and Black Sheep in food brand production and Furahaa Group, Veggie Grill, and several others in the F&B plant-based portfolio.

While most of KBW Ventures in plant-based or “alt meat” genre are outside the MENA region, Prince Khalid Al Waleed added, “KBW Ventures is location agnostic; we’re looking for the right fit in terms of value proposition, not where the head office happens to be. If we are pitched with a strong green technology company in the region, we would of course want to be part of a raise.”