Li Ka-shing backs food tech company in $90m raise

Hampton Creek, the food technology company, has raised $90 million in Series C funding from a consortium of investors led by existing investors Horizon Ventures, the VC firm owned by Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing, and Khosla Ventures, the Silicon Valley firm.

Hampton Creek is known for producing mayonnaise without eggs and replacing them with plants in its brand Just Mayo.

New investors involved in the round included Marc Benioff, founder and chief executive of Salesforce, the cloud computing company; Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of Facebook; and Far East Ventures, the venture capital arm of Far East Organization, the majority shareholder of food and beverage company Yeo Hiap Seng.

Hampton Creek has now raised a total of $120 million this year, after Horizon led an earlier Series B round raising $23 million in February. That round of funding helped Hampton Creek expand into Hong Kong supermarket chain ParknShop.

This latest round of financing will fund further expansion in Western Europe and Asia and also fund research and development in the screening of plants and automation processes, according to a statement. “Hampton Creek is rewriting the operating systems (OS) of food,” said new investor, Bryan Johnson, founder of VC firm The OS Fund.