Chickpea pasta maker Banza just raised $20 million in a Series B round - and plans to spend most of it on marketing and expanding to restaurants

Banza

• Chickpea pasta maker Banza has just raised $20 million in a Series B round led by Enlightened Hospitality Investments and and Prelude Growth Partners.
• Banza has benefitted from the plant-based protein wave and the growing popularity of brands including Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat in recent years.
• The company plans to use the funding to expand its marketing and into restaurants, as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have also done.
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Chickpea pasta maker Banza has just raised $20 million, for a total of nearly $30 million raised, the company is announcing today.

The Series B round was led by Enlightened Hospitality Investments - the growth equity fund affiliated with Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group - and Prelude Growth Partners, a consumer product goods-focused growth equity fund.

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While Banza has been around since 2014, and has a footprint across 12,000 grocery stores nationally including Target and Whole Foods, it's benefitted from the plant-based protein wave and the growing popularity of brands including Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat in recent years.

Still, the company is not as well recognized, so it will primarily use the new funding for sales and marketing and new products.

"People that know Banza love it, but the fact is that number is still small," Brian Rudolph, cofounder and CEO of Banza told Business Insider. "We over-index on young consumers, and marketing will help us drive more awareness."

Banza wants to expand into newer categories and restaurants

Banza's mission is to make food made with wheat, corn, and rice more nutritious with chickpeas, which it claims has nearly double the protein, three times the fiber, and a third fewer net carbs. After starting with pasta, it's launched other products like chickpea rice.

For Banza, the funding is a chance to disrupt other categories and expand into restaurants as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have done, said Rudolph. That's where Enlightened Hospitality Investments' expertise will come in, since it works with restaurants including Gramercy Tavern and Shake Shack.

For the investors, Banza is the chance to capitalize on the growing plant-based food movement. Mark Leavitt, cofounder and managing partner at Enlightened Hospitality Investments, said that consumer interest in plant-based protein was "a real shift versus a short-term fad" and that Banza was poised to be a leader in the space.

Banza will also invest heavily in marketing

While previous funding went toward opening its own manufacturing facility in California to meet demand, most of the new funding will go into marketing, said Rudolph.

Most of Banza's marketing has been user-generated content on social media platforms like Instagram. The company says it received around 30,000 pieces of user-generated content from home cooks sharing how they use the product.

"Historically, we've been very scrappy and done very little paid marketing," said Rudolph. "Now we're looking to explore a wide range of mediums, from podcasts and email newsletters to digital media."