In this podcast series, Alex Shandrovsky interviews investors about benchmarks for funding Alt Proteins in 2026 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 101: Planetary: Charles Pontvianne on the 16M CHF Series A, licensing IP to sugar giants, and bypassing CapEx
In this episode, I sit down with Charles Pontvianne, CFO of Planetary, a Swiss biotech startup that recently announced a massive 16 million CHF Series A co-led by Radical Capital and Oetker Group. Charles breaks down their highly unusual “middleman” equity story: instead of building their own massive fermentation facilities, Planetary licenses their biomanufacturing IP directly to legacy sugar producers, utilizing their existing infrastructure to upcycle sucrose side-streams into high-protein B2B ingredients. We discuss how Planetary successfully navigated the dreaded “Food-for-Fuel” ethical bottleneck by producing “Food-for-Food,” and how getting retail giant Aldi to reorder their vegan chicken fillet was the ultimate commercial derisking mechanism for their Series A investors.
Listen to the full episode to hear Charles explain the exact structure of their data room and why treating your fundraise like selling a house is critical to creating VC FOMO.
Key Facts Planetary:
- Headquarters: Switzerland
- Goal: To act as the missing link between industrial agriculture and FoodTech by licensing biomanufacturing IP to global carbohydrate/sugar producers, upcycling their sucrose side-streams into Mycoprotein ingredients for the B2B market.
- Milestone: Closed a 16 million CHF Series A (co-led by Radical Capital and Oetker Group) while successfully scaling up a 50 cubic meter fermentation plant in Switzerland and launching a Mycoprotein-based vegan chicken fillet in Aldi.
PLANETARY is a Swiss full-stack fermentation platform building and operating a global network of biomanufacturing facilities. Their proprietary BioBlocks™ fermentation and AI platform handles scale-up, process optimization, and production across three verticals: mycoprotein ingredients, precision fermentation-derived products, and bio-based materials. They are infrastructure-as-a-service for the bioeconomy — clients access Planetary’s facilities, platform, and expertise to get fermentation-based products to market with optimized COGS and sustainability metrics.
Link to Apple Podcast here.
Link to YouTube here.
