Investment Climate Podcast

Episode 117: B-COS: Chiara Guidi on Ghent's Founder-Friendly Spin-Out Playbook, Plant Vaccines Over Pesticides, and Why Lean Beats Big in AgTech
In this episode, I speak with Dr. Chiara Guidi, Co-Founder & CEO of B-COS — a University of Ghent spin-off, incubated at Biotope by VIB, that is building "plant vaccines": carbohydrate bioactives (chito-oligosaccharides) produced by precision fermentation that switch on a crop's own defense system, making it more resilient and cutting the need for chemical pesticides. A year out of academia, Chiara and her team have raised €1M combining VC and grant funding. She gives an unusually candid look at what it takes to commercialize 15 years of university research: how B-COS became the very first company through Ghent's new "Fast Lane" spin-out program — a standardized, founder-friendly deal (low equity, low royalties, a worldwide exclusive perpetual license) that let them incorporate in a month instead of a year — and why a brand-new deal structure that no investor had seen before became one of the trickiest parts of the raise. We dig into how she turned public research into a de-risked asset investors love, how she built commercial traction at pre-seed through 100+ customer conversations, the two-track product strategy (long-horizon crop protection plus faster-to-market biostimulants), the reality of Belgium's grant ecosystem, and a refreshingly disciplined, "lean-and-mean" philosophy on valuation and survival.
🎧 Listen to the full episode to hear why a spin-out license can hand investors 15 years of de-risked science essentially for free, how B-COS answered the "there's nothing here yet" objection at pre-seed, why you often need funding in hand before you can win a VLAIO grant, how Chiara benchmarks valuation in a market with only five or six possible acquirers, and her answer to the question every deep-tech founder dreads: why won't the giants just crush you?

Key Facts: B-COS
Chiara Guidi (Co-Founder & CEO): https://www.linkedin.com/in/chiara-guidi-
Website: b-cos.eu
Headquarters: Belgium
What They Do: "Plant vaccines" for sustainable crop protection. B-COS uses precision fermentation to produce carbohydrate bioactives (chito-oligosaccharides) that activate a crop's natural defense system — improving resilience against fungal disease, nematodes, and drought stress, and reducing chemical pesticide use. Initial focus crop: 
Funding: €1M pre-seed (VC + grants), backed by Agri Investment Fund (AIF) and VP Capital, with support from Biotope by VIB, a VLAIO research grant, and EIT (European Institute of Innovation & Technology).

Blurb
B-COS is built on an elegant idea: instead of spraying crops with chemicals to kill what attacks them, teach the plant to defend itself. Using precision fermentation to brew carbohydrate bioactives — chito-oligosaccharides that act like a vaccine for plants — B-COS switches on a crop's own immune response, building resilience to fungal disease, nematodes, and drought while cutting reliance on synthetic pesticides. Spun out of fifteen years of research at Ghent University and incubated at Biotope by VIB, it is a platform with reach well beyond its first focus crop.

Episode 116: Just Meat Protein: Ellie Whelan & Aarti Tobin on Landing a Strategic Corporate Lead, Upcycling Chicken into Whey's Rival, and Structuring University IP That Investors Will Back
In this episode, I speak with the two women behind Just Meat Protein — Ellie Whelan, CEO & Co-Founder, and Dr. Aarti Tobin, Chief Scientific Officer and the scientist behind the technology — fresh off closing a A$1.8M seed round. Just Meat Protein takes low-value cuts of meat and turns them into high-value, nutrient-dense ingredients: their hydrolysed chicken protein powder (ProPepta) is roughly 90% protein, highly soluble, clear in solution, and allergen-free — an alternative to whey protein isolate arriving right as whey prices spike and supply tightens. Ellie walks us through how their lead investor, poultry giant Ingham's Enterprises, came out of a multi-year R&D relationship that began while the tech was still a project inside CSIRO — a strategic partner that both supplies the raw material and shares the circular-economy vision. We get into the real objections they faced (plant-based skeptics, the "meat in my cookies-and-cream" consumer perception question, and scale-up manufacturing risk), and Dr. Tobin gives a masterclass in how a scientist earns an investor's confidence on scale-up. Then Ellie breaks down two things founders rarely explain well: how they structured CSIRO's IP as a license-for-royalty (keeping the research org off the cap table) and how Australian matching grants stack on top of a closed round.
🎧 Listen to the full episode to hear how a low-value poultry cut worth $1–2/kg becomes a $40+/kg ingredient, why whey's price surge and supply shortage are a tailwind, Dr. Tobin's answer to "how do you know it scales?", the bare-bones fundraising stack (a Canva deck and a Microsoft Teams data room), and the exclusive-worldwide-license-with-assignment-triggers structure that made investors comfortable with university-born IP.
Key Facts: Just Meat Protein
Ellie Whelan (CEO & Co-Founder): https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliewhelan
Dr. Aarti Tobin (CSO & Co-Founder): https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarti-tobin-82a121141
Headquarter: Australia
What They Do: Upcycle low-value meat cuts (poultry) into high-value, nutrient-dense protein ingredients. Flagship product ProPepta is a hydrolysed chicken protein powder — ~90% protein, highly soluble (stays in solution up to ~60%), clear in solution, and allergen-free — positioned as a whey protein isolate alternative for sports nutrition, functional foods, beverages, and specialized/aged-care nutrition.
Funding: A$1.8M seed round, led by strategic corporate investor Ingham's Enterprises (Australia's largest poultry producer), which invested A$1.05M for a ~10% stake. Ingham's is both an equity partner and a raw-material supplier.

Blurb
JUST MEAT PROTEIN is built on a simple, powerful piece of arithmetic: a poultry cut worth a dollar or two a kilo can become a protein ingredient worth forty-plus. Born from four years of research inside CSIRO, the company's hydrolysed chicken protein — ProPepta — hits roughly 90% protein while solving problems whey can't: it stays soluble at high concentrations, runs clear in solution for protein waters and beverages, and is allergen-free. It arrives at an ideal moment, as whey prices climb and supply tightens, and as demand for high-protein foods surges across sports nutrition, functional foods, and GLP-1-era nutrition. It is upcycling as a business model — more value from every animal, and a genuine circular-economy story.

Episode 115: BEAM Circular Accelerator (Powered by gener8tor): Darko Mandich on Crossing to the Other Side of the Table, Off-Take Agreements Over LOIs, and Turning Almond Waste into a Bioeconomy
In this episode, I catch up with my friend Darko Mandich — Managing Director of the BEAM Circular Accelerator (Powered by gener8tor) and Ag Practice Chair at gener8tor — for a rare look at fundraising from the investor's seat. Darko knows both sides intimately: he built and exited MeliBio, the bee-free honey pioneer (acquired by Switzerland's FoodYoung Labs), and has now crossed the table to back early-stage founders turning agricultural waste into value. He shares what genuinely surprised him about the investor side — how many internal "yeses" it takes to cut a single check, and why founder patience is so misunderstood — and makes a passionate case that the founders winning in 2026 are commercially driven, not science driven, doing far more with far less. We dig into why LOIs no longer cut it (investors now want signed off-take agreements), how gener8tor and BEAM Circular are attacking the CapEx barrier head-on by building a shared California Bioeconomy Innovation Campus in Modesto, and why California's Central Valley — with 80% of the world's almonds and mountains of hulls and shells — is one of the best launchpads on earth for the circular bioeconomy.
🎧 Listen to the full episode to hear the single biggest mistake founders make when following up with investors (and the "keep delighting us with news" approach that works instead), why aggressive AI-generated outreach lands you in the spam folder, how building in public and authenticity get investors to source you, what BEAM Circular looks for in an applicant, and the incentives that make the Central Valley — not just San Francisco — a place to scale.

Key Facts: BEAM Circular Accelerator (Powered by gener8tor)
Darko Mandich: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darkomandich
Websites: gener8tor.com · beamcircular.org
Program Base: Modesto, California 
Focus: Early- to mid-stage startups in biomanufacturing, waste transformation, and circular solutions across agriculture and natural resources — turning agricultural side streams (e.g., almond hulls and shells) into materials, fuels, ingredients, and chemicals.
Support (per company): ~$100K in combined support — a $15K non-dilutive grant, a $35K investment, and $50K in California Bioeconomy Innovation Campus credits — plus mentorship and partner perks.

Blurb
The BEAM CIRCULAR ACCELERATOR, powered by gener8tor, is built on a bet about geography and timing: that the next wave of the bioeconomy won't be built only in San Francisco or Boston, but in places like California's Central Valley — where 80% of the world's almonds are grown, and where the hulls, shells, and side streams once treated as waste are becoming feedstock for materials, fuels, ingredients, and chemicals. In partnership with the Modesto nonprofit BEAM Circular, the program pairs small, concierge cohorts with a shared California Bioeconomy Innovation Campus designed to remove the single biggest killer of deep-tech startups — CapEx — so founders don't have to burn venture dollars building their own pilot facilities.

Episode 114: Saku Biosciences: Mark van Zee on Raising Friends-and-Family in a Frozen Market, Betting on the Jockey, and Giving a VC Goosebumps in Five Minutes
In this episode, I sit down with Mark van Zee, Co-Founder & CEO of Saku Biosciences, who just closed a $940K round with Big Idea Ventures coming in as the institutional lead. It's a refreshingly different conversation for this show — instead of a later-stage playbook, Mark takes us all the way back to the very first checks, and how you actually raise when the market is frozen. Saku started fundraising two weeks after the tariff announcement that sent institutional capital "to zero," so Mark and his co-founder John got scrappy: friends-and-family checks of $5K–$100K that triggered a "pile-on" chain reaction, plus capital from a non-obvious private institution that took a year of relationship-building and ultimately saved the company. Mark reframes friends-and-family money not as a source of anxiety but as motivation — a commitment "in blood" — and makes the case that early-stage investing is betting on the jockey, not the horse. We close on one of the best fundraising stories I've heard: how the Saku team reverse-engineered exactly what Big Idea Ventures' decision-maker was looking for ("something that gives me goosebumps") and built a five-minute narrative to deliver it.
🎧 Listen to the full episode to hear why fundraising is more like dating than a transaction, how to unlock non-obvious capital that isn't promoted anywhere, why you sell to the associate and the partner completely differently, how Mark turned "I ride my bike to college classes at fourteen" into a goosebumps pitch, and why nobody in food tech has cracked the scalable-company code yet — but the wave is coming.

Key Facts: Saku Biosciences
Mark van Zee: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-van-zee-089910154
Website: sakubio.com
Headquarters: Los Angeles, California
Funding: $940K round (SAFE), with Big Idea Ventures as institutional lead (Global Food Innovation Fund II) — following a friends-and-family raise and capital from a private institutional source.

Blurb
SAKU BIOSCIENCES exists to fix a quiet but expensive failure in biomanufacturing: the strains companies screen in the lab are optimized for the lab, not for the fermentation tank they'll actually run in. That mismatch produces false positives, wasted scale-up campaigns, and stubbornly poor unit economics. Saku's PicoShells platform — hollow, porous hydrogel particles that isolate millions of strain variants and let them be tested under true bioreactor conditions — lets producers select for real-world manufacturing performance, and get to the cost parity that fermentation needs to displace incumbent animal- and plant-derived inputs.

Episode 113: Rainbow Crops: Giacomo Bastianelli on Treating Every Investor as "One Shot," Selling Without Selling, and Fundraising as a Probability Matrix
In this episode, I welcome back Giacomo Bastianelli, Co-Founder & CEO of Rainbow Crops — and one of the first founders to return to the podcast, because eighteen months ago we were talking about his pre-seed, and today he's just closed a €9.7M seed round plus a $7M grant from the Gates Foundation. Rainbow Crops is a VIB spin-off out of Ghent developing next-generation crop genetics, combining precision breeding, multiplex genome editing, and AI to tackle the complex, multi-gene traits — yield, stress resilience — that a single-gene approach can't touch. Giacomo walks us through how he ran the raise like a disciplined operator: preparing the seed materials before the pre-seed even closed, building a manually curated 60-name investor funnel in Trello, and treating every first interaction as a single shot he couldn't waste. He explains why his lead investor, Turin-based LIFTT, was nowhere on that list — and why doing the work is exactly what opens you up to that kind of serendipity. Along the way we get into a genuinely different take on persuasion for deep tech: honesty as a sales strategy, presenting risk as a probability matrix, and why the best salespeople never actually sell.
🎧 Listen to the full episode to hear why Giacomo built his own pitch deck instead of hiring an agency (and when a "polisher" makes sense), how he structured a results deck that lands for both non-technical investors and PhD experts, why you should pitch your tier-two and tier-three investors first, how he used a probabilistic model to talk investors through regulatory and patent risk, and the "tip of the iceberg" principle behind a deck that could survive real due diligence.

Key Facts: Rainbow Crops
Giacomo Bastianelli: https://www.linkedin.com/in/giacomob
Website: rainbowcrops.com
Headquarters: Ghent, Belgium
Funding: €9.7M seed round led by LIFTT (with LIFTT EuroInvest), alongside AIF, PINC, VIB, Corteva (via Corteva Catalyst), and Maia Ventures — plus a separate $7M grant from the Gates Foundation for climate-resilient corn and sorghum.

Blurb
RAINBOW CROPS is built on a hard genetic truth: the traits that matter most in agriculture — yield, drought tolerance, climate resilience — are almost never controlled by a single gene. They emerge from networks of genes interacting at once, which is precisely why they've resisted decades of conventional breeding and single-edit biotech. Rainbow Crops attacks that complexity head-on with its Trait Foundry™ platform, pairing multiplex genome editing with AI and automated phenotyping to search enormous combinatorial spaces and engineer the multi-gene traits that older tools simply can't reach.