In this podcast series, 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 17: Fermtech
In this episode, Alex sits down with Andy Clayton, CEO and founder of FermTech, a company turning brewing industry waste into valuable food ingredients. Andy shares his journey of raising funds through a mix of traditional investors and crowdfunding, using Crowdcube to complete their round.
We dive into the psychology behind crowdfunding, the challenges of verifying claims, and how the platform helped FermTech tap into their own networks for investment. Andy also offers key takeaways for startups considering this path, especially in the food tech space.
If you’re curious about alternative fundraising strategies, this one’s for you!
Key Facts Fermtech:
- Goal: To revolutionize food sustainability by creating delicious, cocoa-enhancing ingredients that save 98% CO2 emissions versus cocoa.
- Recently raised a £325k crowdfunding target on Crowdcube.
Alex’s Top Findings:
- Crowdfunding Complements Traditional Investment. Crowdfunding helped finalize the investment round rather than starting from scratch. “The function that crowdfunding played for us was that it finished off a round. You can’t just start from zero and expect to close a round on crowdfunding only. You have to come to the platform having already filled a large amount of your raise.”
- Crowdfunding Encourages Existing Networks to Invest More. “Although we managed to just about close our round, in truth, a lot of it didn’t actually come from the crowdfunding platform. What the platform forced us to do was really shake the tree of the networks that we already had.”
- Crowdfunding Platforms Rely on Psychology and Momentum. “The entire crowdfunding platform is built around the algorithms of human psychology as expressed through the crowd. You start your crowdfunding raise already close to fully funded.”
Link to Apple Podcast here.
Catch the full podcast series here.
