Foodini: Dylan McDonnell 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 47: Foodini: Dylan McDonnell shares how to get funded in 2025

This episode features Dylan McDonald, CEO of Foodini, a dietary-intelligence platform that powers truly personalized menus by mapping recipes down to ingredient level so diners know exactly what they can (and can’t) eat when dining out. Fresh off a $1.8M raise led by Untapped Ventures, Dylan explains why Foodini prioritized the B2B data layer first—standardizing opaque restaurant recipes and products—so consumer experiences can be accurate at scale. He shares case studies across SMBs, hotel groups, stadiums, and events showing personalized menus lift revenue and retention, cut staff questions by ~60%, and reduce costly mistakes, while Foodini’s disclaimers keep liability clear. We dig into defensibility (the recipe/ingredient data moat and AI tagging), how to answer “why won’t the majors just build it,” and what actually moved investors despite early low revenue: hard proof that personalization drives results. Dylan closes with what Foodini needs next—pilots and partnerships with online ordering platforms, multi-unit restaurant groups, stadiums, universities, and airlines.

Key Facts Foodini:

Goal: To empower individuals with food allergies, intolerances, and dietary preferences to dine safely and confidently, no matter where they are in the world.
Recently raised $1.8M led by Untapped Ventures and joined by Sister Ventures, MVP Capital Partners, and Solvable Syndicate.

Alex’s Top Findings:

The Cold Form That Closed a Lead. Lead investor came not from a warm intro but via a cold website form—rare, but proof to keep all channels open. “ They say when it comes to meeting your lead investor, it's warm introductions. It goes without saying is by far the most success we've had, just even in terms of getting meetings top of funnel. But ironically, I met our lead investor via a form on their website. It was one of those that actually came off. I completed a form. Their team got back to me, had a meeting, and from there, the rest is history. So just goes to show, even though a lot of the time those things don't come off, every so often they do."
AI + Health: Investor Fit Beyond Capital. The lead’s AI focus and partner’s passion for wellness made them a “perfect combo” for Foodini’s thesis. " They [lead investor] were a relatively new fund here in California with an AI focus, and AI is obviously very core and fundamental to what we do and our ability to scale our solution accurately. We did some research on them and their main partner there, who was also a guy who had a lot of interest in wellness, health, longevity, and lifestyle. So we quickly identified that the combination of that AI focus plus that vision in terms of health, wellness, longevity was the perfect combo for us.”
ROI Case Studies Across Verticals. Enterprise, SMB, hotels, stadiums—all showed stronger retention, revenue lift, and fewer staff questions when Foodini was implemented. " Our data is showing that personalizing the menus and giving that experience to the cons