ClearCOGS: Matt Wampler 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 29: ClearCOGS: Matt Wampler shares how to get funded in 2025

In this episode, Matt Wampler, co-founder and CEO of ClearCOGS, shares the gritty, real-world journey of building a predictive analytics platform that helps restaurants reduce food waste—and the uphill battle of raising capital in an industry most investors don’t want to touch. From reframing objections like “we don’t like restaurants” to securing strategic sustainability-focused backers, Matt opens up about the mistakes he made early in the fundraising process, how honest conversations (not pitch decks) moved the needle, and why founders need to stop chasing investor approval and start building undeniable value.

Key Facts ClearCOGS:

Goal: To help restaurants adapt to changing market conditions, optimize their operations, and ultimately achieve greater success and profitability.
Recently raised $3.8M led by Closed Loop Partners, and joined by Myriad Venture Partners and Level Up Ventures.

Alex’s Top Findings:

Don’t Build for Investors—Build for Customers. ClearCOGS succeeded by focusing relentlessly on customer outcomes, not pitch decks. Ironically, this is what helped them eventually win over their lead investor. " I think one of the things that we really learned back then was that investors always said they wanted something, and then it always changed. We basically said, ‘Hey, we're gonna spend our time not trying to build for investors, but we're gonna focus on the business, focus on our clients with the full understanding that if we take care of our clients and grow the business.’ The fundraising will take care of itself. Luckily, this investor happened to be good at staying in touch with us."
Strategic Investors Can Fill Your Blind Spots. The team sought partners who could complement their restaurant and tech expertise—especially in sustainability, which played a key role in the round. " A strategic investor in the sense that we were looking for somebody in the sustainability space. My background is all restaurants. My co-founder's background is all technology. We happened to be doing this activity, which really made a difference in the sustainability world. Something that we had very little knowledge of. So we looked at them as a great leg of the stool to help us move forward."
You Don’t Need Everyone to Like You—Just the Right Ones. Matt embraced the idea that fundraising is not about being universally liked but about resonating deeply with the right investor. “Your job is to go get one in 10 to really like you and believe in you… The eights and nines out of tens don’t invest.”