Cultivated Biosciences: Tomas Turner shares how to get funded in 2024

Investment Climate Podcast: Fundraising Playbooks From Food Tech CEOs and VCs

In this podcast series, co-produced by vegconomist, Alex Shandrovsky interviews investors about benchmarks for funding Alt Proteins in 2024 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.

Episode 06: Cultivated Biosciences: Tomas Turner shares how to get funded in 2024

In this episode, Alex talks to Tomas, CEO & Co-Founder of Cultivated Biosciences who have raised over $6 million, primarily through equity rounds, with a recent $5 million closed in January. Cultivated Biosciences focused on creating creamy emulsions from yeast-grown fats as a B2B ingredient for dairy-free alternatives. Tomas talks about how the preparation, fundraising process and strategy their team did to achieve the goal.

Key Facts Cultivated Biosciences:

Goal: To solve the problem of texture and functionality in dairy free alternatives
Raised a total of $6M USD
Navos Ventures and Van der Lely family as lead investors

Alex’ Top Findings:

Fundraising Preparation. Assembling a detailed pitch deck and structured data room is crucial. Include all achievements to date. Engage previous round lead investors for advice and preparation. Organize potential investor outreach through warming introductions and detailed data room access.
Data Room Strategy. Use a Google Drive organizing the data room. Maintain a three-step access approach: initial slide deck, non-confidential data room, and NDA-protected detailed information. Follow a template that includes sections on technology, team, commercial, financials, and legal aspects.
Identifying and Approaching Investors. Target investors with a history in AgriFood tech, especially those focused on seed-stage investments in Europe. Expand outreach to hardware and general seed investors, both regionally and globally. Utilize CRM tools like Notion to track and manage investor interactions and introductions.
Challenges and Learning Points. Regulatory process and commercial traction were recurring due diligence questions. Be selective with sample distribution to avoid overburdening the R&D team. Delay sample sharing until later stages of due diligence.
Final Reflections. Long-term industrial views from investors are so important. Balance production and R&D efforts during fundraising. Leverage industry connections and data for successful fundraising. Founders need to understand investor cycles and returns expectations.