Actual Veggies: Jason Rosenbaum shares how to get funded in 2025

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 25: Actual Veggies: Jason Rosenbaum shares how to get funded in 2025

In this episode, I interviewed Jason Rosenbaum, co-founder and co-CEO of Actual Veggies, who recently closed a $7M Series A. Jason breaks down why his company took a bold contrarian path in the crowded plant-based market—eschewing meat analogs and ultra-processed ingredients in favor of clean-label, whole-food veggie burgers that actually taste like vegetables. We dive deep into what today’s investors really care about (spoiler: it’s not always the tech), how Actual Veggies is winning with data-backed growth and strong margins, and how transparency and strategic relationships—not hype—powered their raise.

Key Facts Actual Veggies:

Goal: To create delicious, chef-crafted, veggie burgers that celebrate vegetables instead of trying to mask them.
Recently closed a $7M Series A.

Alex’s Top Findings:

Taste + Clean Label = Winning Combo. Actual Veggies products avoid pea protein (initially), gums, binders, and other ultra-processed ingredients to maintain flavor and simplicity. " So we have experimented with pea protein and have some new protein or higher protein burgers coming out later this year, where we have increased or added pea protein. But we're being very cautious with how much pea protein or other vegan protein sources we're putting in there. What happens is that when you use pea protein, the taste and texture start to alter. It also has a bad connotation. Some people say it doesn't sit.”
Investor Updates: Radical Transparency is an Edge. Jason shares detailed quarterly updates with real sales numbers, financials, and asks—building trust and enthusiasm from the cap table. " For the investors, we aren't talking to them daily, weekly, or monthly; we are sending quarterly update emails. We send whatever is happening with the company, we have a whole format of what we like to show. We want to show things that we wouldn't usually show to the public, but because they're our investors, they're part of our family and inner circle. So we show them everything from our finances, including how much runway we have, how much cash we have in the bank, and how much revenue we've generated, even if we've missed our projections. We're very upfront and honest.”
Strong Gross Margins Set You Apart. Actual Veggies operates with margins in the 50% range, allowing room for sustainable growth and marketing investment—unlike many plant-based startups. " Investors want to see 40%, 50%, 60% margins... starting negative is a bad idea. We start with strong gross margins in the 50s. That’s rare in frozen. That's something that investors are looking at, and that was something that our investors got excited about when they looked at our numbers."