Vegan Chicken Nugget Startup Raises $6 Million to Build “Pandemic-Proof” Food System

This month, Seattle-based vegan meat company Rebellyous Foods announced that it closed a $6 million investment round led by investment firms Clear Current Capital, Fifty Years, and Liquid 2 Ventures. In 2019, Rebellyous debuted its flagship crispy vegan nuggets—made using its novel manufacturing techniques from textured wheat, chicken-less flavoring, cornstarch, oil, and corn breading—at Seattle-based hospital Swedish Medical Center and aims to expand its products into the foodservice sector. 

In addition to vegan chicken nuggets, the company aims to produce equipment meant to create plant-based meat at a larger scale. It will use this funding round to accelerate the development of such machinery—which can be replicated by other plant-based meat companies to help them grow—scale its manufacturing, and wire equipment and mechanical engineers at its Seattle research facility. “We need a pandemic-proof food system that can meet the nutritional needs of our growing human family,” Fifty Years Founding Partner Ela Madej, and new board member at Rebellyous, said. “We’re also happy to support job creation in a time when many other businesses are having to lay off workers.” 

Rebellyous will also use the funding to broaden its product portfolio with the overall, and urgent, goal of producing affordable and abundant vegan alternatives that spare animals such as chickens from lives of extreme confinement. “Bird flu, swine flu, and now COVID-19 demonstrate that keeping large numbers of animals in close contact with one another presents a tremendous risk for global health,” Rebellious Founder and CEO Christie Lagally said. “However, to transition away from our heavy dependence on meat, it’s critical that we make plant-based meat affordable and widely available through innovative production technology. At Rebellyous, our mission is to make plant-based meat that is better than animal meat in every way, from price and convenience to taste and nutrition.”