Investment Climate

FoodSparks: Yoni Glickman shares how to get funded in 2026
Investment Climate Podcast: Fundraising Playbooks From Food Tech CEOs and VCs 
In this podcast series, Alex Shandrovsky interviews investors about benchmarks for funding Alt Proteins in 2025 and uncovers the investment playbooks of successful Climate Tech CEOs and Leading VCs.
Podcast Host Alex Shandrovksy is a strategic advisor to numerous global food tech accelerators and companies, including alternative proteins and cellular agriculture leaders. His focus is on investor relations and post-raise scale for agrifood tech companies. This podcast is syndicated through our media partners, Foodtech Weekly and Vegconomist.
Episode 68: FoodSparks: Yoni Glickman on the death of the "Power Law" in FoodTech and the GLP-1 Revolution
In this episode, I sit down with Yoni Glickman, Managing Partner of FoodSparks (PeakBridge’s seed-stage fund). Yoni shares why PeakBridge completely avoided the hype cycles of vertical farming and insect protein, focusing instead on a rational, "boring" thesis: solving real problems in the food system. Yoni breaks down why he believes the "Power Law" (one 10x exit returning the fund) doesn't apply to FoodTech and how he constructs a portfolio for realistic 2-5x returns. We also dive into his four new investments—including Finnish mushroom leader Kääpä Biotech and GI-health platform Evinature—and discuss the massive, underappreciated impact of "Direct-to-Patient" pharma and GLP-1 drugs on the future of nutrition. 🎧 Listen to the full episode to hear Yoni’s breakdown of why B2B ingredient blends are the smart play over consumer brands.
Key Facts  FoodSparks:
Goal: To invest at the intersection of health, nutrition, and food, avoiding "invented problems" and focusing on scalable B2B solutions.
Milestone: Actively deploying from "Growth 2" fund with a unique structure: Seed pockets ($300k-$500k) for validation and Series A checks ($2M-$5M) for scaling.
Alex’s Top Findings:
The "Power Law" is Dead in FoodTech. Yoni challenges the Silicon Valley VC model where one moonshot pays for all failures. In FoodTech, success comes from rational portfolio construction where a cluster of companies delivers solid 2-5x returns, rather than betting on a single 100x unicorn. "Food is not gonna be, ever in my belief, a 'you bet in some sort of technology and you return the funds with one investment 10x'... You need to construct your portfolio in a rational way... and really end up in an overall fund return of what we're looking at, which is the three to four X."
Strategic CapEx Only. PeakBridge isn't allergic to CapEx, but they are allergic to generic CapEx. Yoni explains their investment in Kääpä Biotech (mushrooms): they will fund CapEx if it builds a defensive moat (like specific extraction tech or growing protocols), but generic downstream processing should always be outsourced. "I'm not allergic to CapEx, I'm allergic to massive CapEx... The CapEx should be strategic when it does something special. So I don't want to invest in generic CapEx because you can often find CMOs to do the generic CapEx."
The "Dry Blend" B2B Pivot. Using their portfolio company "Whip" (plant-based ice cream) as an example, Yoni explains why they pushed the founders away from a consumer brand. The winning model is selling a complex, hard-to-reverse-engineer dry ingredient blend to existing ice cream makers, avoiding the cash-burn of marketing and cold-chain logistics. "We don't believe that the opportunity is gonna be in consumer because you're going to have to spend a huge amount of money on marketing... We believe that you have a wonderful product which can be moved to the B2B framework... It's not that simple to reverse engineer a blend."

GOTA Ventures: Vincent Kuiper shares how to get funded in 2026
Investment Climate Podcast: Fundraising Playbooks From Food Tech CEOs and VCs 
In this podcast series, Alex Shandrovsky interviews investors about benchmarks for funding Alt Proteins in 2025 and uncovers the investment playbooks of successful Climate Tech CEOs and Leading VCs.
Podcast Host Alex Shandrovksy is a strategic advisor to numerous global food tech accelerators and companies, including alternative proteins and cellular agriculture leaders. His focus is on investor relations and post-raise scale for agrifood tech companies. This podcast is syndicated through our media partners, Foodtech Weekly and Vegconomist.
Episode 67: GOTA Ventures: Vincent Kuiper on why Syndicates are winning in 2025 and the "Deal-by-Deal" playbook. 
In this episode, I sit down with Vincent Kuiper, Co-founder of GOTA Ventures, a European investment syndicate disrupting the traditional VC model. Vincent explains why launching a traditional fund as an emerging manager is broken in the current climate and how he utilized the syndicate structure to aggregate over 50 industry experts from 13 countries. We dive into the mechanics of "deal-by-deal" investing, how to monetize without a management fee, and GOTA’s hybrid thesis that balances 12-year deep tech timelines with the faster liquidity of consumer brands. 🎧 Listen to the full episode to hear how Vincent turned his MBA thesis into a live investment vehicle that targets 8 high-conviction deals a year.
Key Facts GOTA Ventures:
Goal: To build the strongest ecosystem in Europe for food tech investing by lowering the barrier to entry for industry experts.
Milestone: Successfully launched a syndicate with 50+ active investors (operators, scientists, executives) investing €150k-€500k per deal.
Alex’s Top Findings:
The Syndicate Advantage: Speed and "Smart" Access. For emerging managers, raising a fund is expensive and slow. Vincent argues that the syndicate model allows for agility and, crucially, democratizes access. By lowering minimum tickets (to ~€5k), GOTA unlocks capital from industry scientists and operators who have deep expertise but cannot write the €250k check required by traditional LPs. "As an emerging manager, it's simply easier to raise capital for a specific deal than for a fund... We have industry operators, executive scientists, all these kinds of experts that don't have the capital to join a VC fund as an LP, but they do have the capital to join... with lower ticket sizes."
Aligned Economics: The "No Management Fee" Model. Unlike traditional VCs charging a 2% annual fee regardless of performance, GOTA operates on a lean "Closing Fee + Carry" model. This ensures the GPs are fully aligned with the investors—they only make real money if the portfolio companies exit successfully. "The closing fee basically covers our expenses and nothing more than that. So we are fully aligned with our investors that we really need to look for upside in our investment opportunities."
The Hybrid Thesis: Balancing Deep Tech with CPG. GOTA takes a contrarian approach by mixing deep tech (Ingredient Innovation/Infrastructure) with Consumer Brands. Vincent explains this is a deliberate portfolio construction strategy to balance the 10-12 year horizons of deep tech with the potentially faster (5-7 year) exits of consumer goods, offering liquidity diversity to angels. "We combine tech-heavy investments with consumer brands... With the consumer brands, your exits are probably between five and seven years. With the more deep tech plays it's 10 to 12 years, and we really believe that the opportunities are in both areas."

Matr Foods: Randi Wahlsten shares how to get funded in 2026
Investment Climate Podcast: Fundraising Playbooks From Food Tech CEOs and VCs 
In this podcast series, Alex Shandrovsky interviews investors about benchmarks for funding Alt Proteins in 2025 and uncovers the investment playbooks of successful Climate Tech CEOs and Leading VCs.
Podcast Host Alex Shandrovksy is a strategic advisor to numerous global food tech accelerators and companies, including alternative proteins and cellular agriculture leaders. His focus is on investor relations and post-raise scale for agrifood tech companies. This podcast is syndicated through our media partners, Foodtech Weekly and Vegconomist.
Episode 66: Matr Foods: Randi Wahlsten on raising €40M for CapEx and redefining "Meat Alternatives" 
In this episode, I sit down with Randi Wahlsten, CEO and Co-founder of Matr Foods, a Danish startup that just secured a massive €40M Series A led by Nova Holdings and the European Investment Bank. Randi reveals how she moved from a pilot line in an old fish factory to funding a "First of a Kind" (FOAK) industrial facility. We discuss why Matr Foods rejected the asset-light CDMO model out of necessity, how they achieved an 80-90% repurchase rate by targeting high-end culinary partners first, and why the future of the industry isn't "meat substitution" but creating entirely new food categories focused on gut health and fiber. 🎧 Listen to the full episode to hear Randi’s strategy on pricing for profitability rather than "fake success."
Key Facts Matr Foods:
Goal: To create a new category of fungal-fermentation food that is clean-label and fiber-rich, rather than a direct "meat mimic."
Milestone: Closed a €40M Series A (Equity + Debt) to build a proprietary industrial-scale production facility.

Alex’s Top Findings:
Your lead investor might come from a “non-fundraising” moment. Randi didn’t meet Novo through a formal intro or a classic pitch meeting. It started because she joined a debate/panel and did a short pitch in that setting. Afterward, a Novo investor approached her and said, “Let’s talk,” and that opened the door. “ I was asked to participate in a debate where I needed to do a little bit of a pitch for a panel, and one of the people on the panel was a Nova Holdings investor, and he came up to me afterwards and said, ‘That's really interesting. Let's have that conversation,’ and that really is how it started. I would normally never think that those kinds of setups would lead to anything, but in our case, it did.”
CapEx wasn’t a strategic preference. It was forced by reality. In a climate where investors love "asset-light," Matr Foods went heavy. Randi explains that for novel fermentation technologies, the CDMO capacity simply doesn't exist yet. By building their own facility, they secure IP, speed of innovation, and long-term margin control that third-party manufacturing can never offer. "We looked at the market very thoroughly across Europe... and we couldn't find anyone anywhere who had facilities that would be close to ready to produce the product... It was by necessity that we said then we're gonna have to scale this technology ourselves."
The "Quality of Revenue" Metric. With limited pilot volume (20-30 tons), Matr couldn't rely on massive sales data to raise its Series A. Instead, they focused on who was buying (aspirational brands like Gasoline Grill) and the repurchase rate. Proving that 80-90% of chefs re-ordered was more valuable than vanity metrics from deep discounting. "You can make a fake success by putting it out in the market at half price... but that's not really proof of anything. We’ve seen... between 80 and 90% repurchase rate. So we've seen, once they've tried it, they're coming back."

Agronomics Limited: Jim Mellon shares how to get funded in 2026
Investment Climate Podcast: Fundraising Playbooks From Food Tech CEOs and VCs 
In this podcast series, Alex Shandrovsky interviews investors about benchmarks for funding Alt Proteins in 2025 and uncovers the investment playbooks of successful Climate Tech CEOs and Leading VCs.
Podcast Host Alex Shandrovksy is a strategic advisor to numerous global food tech accelerators and companies, including alternative proteins and cellular agriculture leaders. His focus is on investor relations and post-raise scale for agrifood tech companies. This podcast is syndicated through our media partners, Foodtech Weekly and Vegconomist.

Episode 65:  Agronomics Limited: Jim Mellon shares how to get funded in 2026
In this episode, I sit down with Jim Mellon, the billionaire entrepreneur and Executive Director of Agronomics, a leading listed company in the field of cellular agriculture. Jim provides a candid, no-holds-barred post-mortem on the recent collapses of industry darlings Believer Meats and Meatable, attributing their downfall to gross overspending and "over-speced" facilities. He contrasts this with his current "frugal" playbook, revealing how portfolio company Clean Food Group acquired a fully functional production facility in Liverpool for just £1M—a fraction of the cost of new builds. Jim also breaks down his aggressive expansion into the Middle East, detailing the specific energy advantages and 50% government subsidies that make the UAE the next logical hub for fermentation. 🎧 Listen to the full episode to hear Jim’s forecast for the next 12 months and why he believes "stainless steel lasts forever.”

Key Facts Agronomics Limited:
Goal: To invest in "Clean Food" (Cellular Agriculture and Precision Fermentation) with a focus on IP ownership and asset-light or distressed-asset models.
Milestone: Portfolio company Clean Food Group recently acquired a production facility for £1M and is set to produce thousands of tons of oil next year; Meatly received approval for pet food in the UK.

Alex’s Top Findings:
The "Frugal" Playbook: Buying Distressed Assets. The era of building greenfield mega-facilities is over. Jim’s winning strategy involves identifying distressed industrial assets and repurposing them. By buying a facility in Liverpool for £1M (essentially the cost of scrap) rather than building new, the cost of capital drops from ~25% of turnover to 4%.  ”We recognized that stainless steel lasts forever. So if you can acquire stainless steel that's maybe been in production for 50 years and refurbish it, it's a lot cheaper than getting it made in China... We paid 1 million pounds for that... It means that the capital cost of carry for that company... is 4% of turnover.”
Why the Giants Fell: Over-Specing and Over-Valuation. Jim offers a blunt assessment of why Believer Meats and Meatable entered administration. It wasn't just the market downturn; it was an internal failure to manage cash burn and an obsession with building "state-of-the-art" facilities that the unit economics couldn't support yet.  “The symptomatic problem of the companies that have gone bad for investors have been overspending and overvaluation... Believer Meats... built a state-of-the-art facility in North Carolina which was over specced, frankly. And Meatable was also, in my opinion, overspending... leases of 1.6 million euros a year... high wages. Lots of unnecessary activities.”
What “Good” Looks Like: Frugal + Opportunistic + Controlled IP + Near Market. Jim gives a clear success checklist: founders who spend carefully, own the critical tech, and can sell something in the near term — not a decade out. “ So what we're looking for is companies that have a frugal mindset, have an opportunistic mindset, that have IP t

The Yield Lab: Gentiane Gorlier shares how to get funded in 2026
Investment Climate Podcast: Fundraising Playbooks From Food Tech CEOs and VCs 
In this podcast series, Alex Shandrovsky interviews investors about benchmarks for funding Alt Proteins in 2025 and uncovers the investment playbooks of successful Climate Tech CEOs and Leading VCs.
Podcast Host Alex Shandrovksy is a strategic advisor to numerous global food tech accelerators and companies, including alternative proteins and cellular agriculture leaders. His focus is on investor relations and post-raise scale for agrifood tech companies. This podcast is syndicated through our media partners, Foodtech Weekly and Vegconomist.
Episode 64:  The Yield Lab: Gentiane Gorlier shares how to get funded in 2026
In this episode, I sit down with Gentiane Gorlier, General Partner at The Yield Lab Europe, an early-stage VC fund with 32 investments across the AgriFood value chain. Gentiane shares a refreshingly contrarian view on why animal protein and health remain critical investment areas for the next decade, despite the hype around alternative proteins. We dive deep into why the "Silicon Valley SaaS" model breaks when applied to biology, the harsh reality that consumers will not pay a "Green Premium," and The Yield Lab’s specific playbook for engaging corporate strategics. Currently raising their second fund, Gentiane explains how they help startups navigate the "valley of death" by bringing multiple corporates to the cap table to ensure balance and commercial viability. 🎧 Listen to the full episode to hear how Gentiane identifies deep-tech winners and why she believes the best time to invest in AgriFood is right now.
Key Facts The Yield Lab:
Goal: Enabling entrepreneurs to sustainably revolutionize agrifood systems globally.
Milestone: Successfully managing a portfolio of 32 companies and currently raising Fund II to deploy larger follow-on checks (up to €6M).
Alex’s Top Findings:
The Contrarian Bet: Animal Health is Here to Stay. While many investors pivoted entirely to alt-protein, The Yield Lab Europe maintains that animal protein remains a cornerstone of the global food system. The focus is on efficiency, ethics, and vaccines to reduce emissions per unit, rather than waiting for an alt-protein takeover that isn't technically or economically ready.  ”We strongly believe that animal protein and animal health should continue to be in the investment thesis for the next years. We absolutely believe that alternative protein is part of the future, but we're simply not there yet... So the real question for us is not whether it exists, but how efficiently and responsibly and ethically it's produced.”
The "Green Premium" is a Myth: Unit Economics Must Lead. The collapse of the insect farming and indoor ag hype cycles taught a brutal lesson: neither consumers nor corporations will pay more just for sustainability. Startups must reach price parity and have a clear path to profitability without relying on a "sustainability tax" that the market refuses to pay. “Nobody wants to pay for sustainability, and that's really something we learn... The economics needs to make sense. Corporate [partners] won't buy your product if it's more expensive... We have seen companies that pivoted away from food ingredients into cosmetics just simply because the food market was not ready to pay the price.”
Strategic Corporate Engagement: The "Two-Corporate" Rule. Engaging corporates too early can burn a startup, but engaging them right is the key to an exit. Gentiane advises against being beholden to a single strategic partner. Instead, aim for two or more strategics to create competitive tension and ensure the startup isn't "manhandled" by one company's internal restructuring or strategy changes. “One of the biggest mistakes startups do is when they go too early to corporate. Bec