foodforecast: Justus Lauten 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 5: foodforecast: Justus Lauten shares how to get funded in 2024

In this episode, Justus Lauten, founder and CEO of foodforecast, shared insights into his journey of building a startup focused on reducing food waste through AI-driven predictions for bakeries, supermarkets, and gastronomy. foodforecast uses advanced AI technology that enables precise sales planning, making production and ordering processes 100% automated and minimizing food waste. The segment provides valuable insights into how essential networking, traction metrics, and strategic investor introductions are in securing funding, as well as the reality of managing fundraising efforts over extended periods in challenging market conditions.

Key Facts foodforecast:

Goal: To reduce the value of food waste by 10 billion euros over the next 10 years.
Raised over €3 million, led by three institutional investors: Future Food Fund, Scalehouse Capital, and Aeronaut Invest.

Alex’s Top Findings:

The First business angels were the management of the bakery. Justus shared that, “The first business angels were the management of the bakery. It was not the company itself. It was the private persons who were investing their private money. They were not familiar with the startup business, but they were seeing that the product was working and that was important for me that they were behind the idea and the product. Of course they also had networks inside the bakery companies as well into other bakery companies.”
Knowing the effects of the investment and dilution is important. As Justus said, “We put a very low valuation into the contract because I was not very skilled at that point. I didn't know the effects of the investment and dilution and that the founder of course should always carry a certain amount of shares during the funding process. This is something that's very important to the investors and that you as a founder should always look at. You should always make sure that you have enough shares for each round. They would have gotten too many shares which would have endangered the next round because the next VC would say okay look this is not working.”
When The crisis happens, often your customers can become your investors. “I went to the lion's den in January or February. We got a deal but then unfortunately Corona also hit Germany and all the restaurants and bakeries had to shut down partially. The deal more or less fell flat. At that point I had only spent my personal money and my bank account was nearing zero. I was getting nervous. That was the point when I approached the business angels first, so they were already customers, they knew exactly what I was doing, they knew also the potential of the software so they were really the angels in that part of the story because they helped the company survive and really push to the next level in finding an institutional VC.” Justus added