Oobli: Ali Wing 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 22: Oobli: Ali Wing shares how to get funded in 2025

In this episode, I sat down with Ali Wing, CEO of Oobli, to explore how sweet proteins are revolutionizing the way we think about sugar reduction in food. Ali takes us through Oobli’s Series B1 fundraising journey, the importance of regulatory approvals, and how they are using a B2C2B model to educate consumers while de-risking adoption for major food brands. We dive into the economics of sweet proteins, why fermentation is the perfect scaling tool, and how strategic offtake agreements are key to securing corporate buy-in.

Key Facts Oobli:

Goal: To completely revolutionize the way we think about sweetness by bringing proteins to replace sugars in our foods.
Recently raised €18 million led by Ingredient Ventures and joining the round were Coastal Ventures and PIVA.

Alex’s Top Findings:

Regulatory Approvals Create Investor Confidence. OoblI secured two "no questions" letters from regulatory agencies, which was a major factor in gaining investor trust and landing commercial agreements. Investors wanted proof that the product was not only novel but also scalable and legally approved for sale. "We were definitely the first movers and people were paying attention, but that doesn't necessarily mean somebody thinks you're ready to scale. So, and of course, no questions doesn't necessarily either. So one is you got to get there because then you're on the radar. I think the second is when you're going no questions, we weren't just getting our first, we were getting our second in a year. We've actually been pretty deep in this and they could start to see that momentum, which I think matters and also talks a lot about our commitment because we're scaling up quite a bit to support that number of regulatory approvals.” Ali said.
B2C2B Model: Using a Consumer Product to De-Risk B2B Adoption. Oobli launched its own chocolate products as an educational tool to introduce consumers to sweet proteins while simultaneously building confidence among corporate partners. This de-risked adoption for CPG companies by proving consumer acceptance and product viability. " The whole idea that proteins don't just build muscle, but can sweeten is a pretty new concept. So we put a high sort of bar on the brand that we have to help CPG derisk their adoption of using sweet proteins by having consumers understand proteins can sweeten. We have retailers that sell it, but we don't do that on-demand if they ask. Otherwise, we're doing D2C because we can do a very cost-effective revenue generating with a great return that's much cheaper than if we just advertise to educate people on sweet proteins way.”
Speak the Language of Your Customers & Investors. If you're in food tech, stop talking about fermentation yields—instead, show how your product makes financial sense for the companies that will buy it. " What we do really well is we don't spend a lot of time pitching our customer pipelines or investors. Our efficiency metric, what people call titers and fermentation, we