Upside Foods Stock: Will it Cultivate an IPO Next Year?

Explore ways to buy Upside Foods stock before an eventual IPO or takeover.

Participate in upcoming IPOs at TradeStation, a reliable broker for IPOs investing*. $500 minimum balance required for eligibility. Act fast, the SpaceX IPO is coming soon.

---

Upside Foods Stock IPO News

01/29/2026: MrBeast Showcases Upside Foods
01/22/2026: Upside Foods launches Lucious Labs
03/20/2025: Upside Foods engages in restructuring
02/19/2024: Upside Foods shelves plans for new US factory
Older news…

About Upside Foods?

Upside Foods makes cultivated meat, a product it says is better for the planet. Cultivated meat, also known as lab-grown meat, uses animal cells to grow the tastiest parts without breeding and slaughtering millions of animals. 

Rather than raising whole chickens, pigs, or cows, we grow only the meat we want to eat—directly from real animal cells. At scale, it will be a more humane and future-friendly way to grow high-quality food for meat lovers everywhere.

Founded as Memphis Meats in 2015, the company changed its name to Upside Foods in 2021. Upside Foods is headquartered in Berkeley, California.

CEO & Founder Uma Valeti, M.D., trained as a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic. He realized some of the technology his team used to help heart attack patients could work to grow animal meat in labs.

Considering the potential positive impact on the planet, he left his medical career to start what became Upside. 

Upside Foods opened its first production plant in November 2021 called the EPIC (Engineering, Production, and Innovation Center).

As of June 2023, the company has FDA and USDA approval to sell its product in the U.S. 

Here’s a video tour of the EPIC facility in Emeryville, California.

Ownership

Upside Foods is a venture-backed private company. Its investors include founders, employees, high-profile individuals, and multiple venture capital firms.

The company has raised more than $600 million since its founding. The latest round was a Series C in April 2022 that raised $400 million to help them “drive product innovation, partnerships, and the infrastructure needed to make cultivated meat at scale.”

Prominent venture capital investors include Tyson’s Foods, Baillie Gifford, Softbank, Norwest, Temasek, Threshold Ventures, Cargill, Finistere, Future Ventures, Kimbal Musk, Fifty Years, CPT Capital, Abu Dhabi Growth Fund, Whole Foods, John Mackey, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and John Doerr.

Valuation

The last confirmed Upside Foods valuation was about $1 billion based on the Series C round completed in April 2022. Private estimates peg the valuation below $1 billion as of Q2 2026.

IPO Potential

The Upside Foods IPO date is unknown. 

The company has yet to prove its viability. Therefore, we should not expect an IPO in the next 24 months. 

Despite a significant April 2022 funding round, Upside Foods is still in the process of scaling up the production of its products.

FDA approval of its first product suggests a path forward, but a profitable business model may be several years away. 

Startups tend to wait until the business is further along before going public. However, favorable IPO market conditions, such as those in 2020 and 2021, could entice the company to go public before being sufficiently scaled. 

Considering its investors, Upside Foods should not have trouble distributing its product. But consumer taste is a big question mark. 

We won’t get a better sense of when the Upside Foods IPO will be until we learn about new funding rounds, the hiring of an underwriter, an S-1 filing (public or confidential), or an IPO date range that reaches the press. 

How to Invest in Upside Foods Stock

Since Upside Foods is not a public company, it is challenging to become an equity owner today. The chances of ownership opportunities may increase if there is a new round of venture-backed funding. 

Retail IPO can take action today to improve your chances of early equity ownership or acquire shares in the eventual IPO. 

You’ll need to be patient.

1. Buy Upside Foods on Pre-IPO investing platforms

The author has seen few opportunities of Upside Foods being available on pre-IPO platforms.

However, investors can monitor pre-IPO investing platforms for future availability. 

If shares become available, expect to pay at least a $10,000 investment minimum. 

2. Buy during the Upside Foods stock IPO through a participating broker

Retail IPO investors may find opportunities to invest during the IPO. That means acquiring shares at the IPO price the night before the company begins trading.

Once reserved for Wall Street’s wealthiest customers, IPO access has become more attainable to retail investors in the past five years. 

Online brokers such as the following give customers free access to IPOs, even with low account balances.

• Robinhood*
• Public
• TradeStation
• Webull
• Moomoo

Check out this list of best brokers for IPO investing to learn more about IPO access for retail investors.

3. Buy Upside Foods after the IPO

Though waiting for the IPO requires patience, there are advantages to waiting for the stock to become publicly traded before owning. 

First of all, the IPO allows investors to review financials. Pre-IPO investing has limited financials available. 

Second, IPO stock prices typically rise with high-demand companies. You can benefit if you’re in early and sell when the price overheats.

Many IPOs start with an immediate price increase (“the pop”). Then the stock falls once quarterly earnings reports become available. 

The stock price declines after the IPOs could become excellent entry points if you were not allocated IPO shares. 

Avoid buying overvalued shares immediately after the IPO. Shares often fall after the IPO due to lockup expirations and quarterly earnings disappointments. 

However, the most disruptive companies will be higher in a decade. Patience pays. 

Upside Foods News Archive

12/14/2023: Upside Foods struggles with lab-grown chicken 
10/28/2023: Cell-cultured meat is far from dead
06/21/2023: UPSIDE is approved for sale in the US
04/20/2023: UPSIDE Foods Announces What’s Next on the Menu
11/17/2022: Lab-Grown Chicken Gets a Green Light From the FDA
04/21/2022: Series C Funding Brings the UPSIDE of Meat One Step Closer
01/22/2020: Memphis Meats (Upside Foods) Raises $161 Million Series B
01/29/2018: Tyson Foods Invests in Memphis Meats

Conclusion

Investors get excited when they identify companies riding extraordinary macroeconomic trends (fake meat). This can lead us to private companies positioning to profit from massive opportunities. 

Buying the stock early on may prove difficult for retail investors. Upside Foods is still one significant funding round away from more widespread pre-IPO access because the $1 billion valuation is not tempting enough for early investors to cash out. 

Once production progresses and the product is for sale in stores and restaurants, an additional funding round could raise the valuation significantly. 

If the products are similar enough to animal-harvested meat, the market potential for Upside Foods stock is healthy. 

Retail investors pursuing early equity and IPO shares should maintain reasonable expectations. Investing in a company at this early stage will be difficult. But should become possible as the company scales. 

If Upside Foods stock is on your radar, good luck. Invest in pre-IPO and IPO companies with caution.