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 53: Sonicflora
In this episode, I sit down with Robin Jansson, CEO & co-founder of Sonicflora, the startup building the world’s first bioacoustic plant database—using ultrasound “stress” signals from plants (like dehydration, pests, or disease) to monitor crop health in real time. Sonicflora recently raised SEK 2.7M (~€250K) led by Almi Invest, after turning an early rejection into a “yes” by reframing their story from a research project to a scalable ag-data platform. Bootstrapped nights and weekends, the team has also secured €550K in grants from AgTech Sweden and the Swedish Board of Agriculture, giving them a two-year runway to scale their plant-sound database. With partnerships at SLU and leading horticulture hubs, Sonicflora is proving how plant acoustics could redefine precision agriculture. Tune in to hear how Robin turned a hard “no” into funding success, built a business around plant sounds, and is pioneering an entirely new data layer for global agriculture.
Key Facts Sonicflora:
- Goal: To set a new global standard for plant health monitoring, empowering agriculture to be more sustainable, resilient, and data-driven..
- Recently raised SEK 2.7M (~€250K) led by Almi Invest.
Alex’s Top Findings:
- From “Hard No” to “Yes” via a Sharper Story. Refining the pitch from research-y to venture-scale unlocked the round. Robin reframed Sonicflora as a scalable data/AI company (not just a study), which reopened a passed investor and converted. “ They actually wanted to pass on that opportunity. So that was back in February. But then I actually met a colleague of his, and actually by then, we had changed our pitch just a little bit, and what we were doing and what we were planning to do. I actually convinced her to take a meeting, and then we had a meeting, and the journey just continued. It was quite a journey just to go from a quite hard no to a maybe to a yes.”
- The Big Vision: A New Data Layer for Agriculture. Sonicflora isn’t a sensor widget; it’s building the world’s first bio-acoustic plant database so growers can detect stress (dehydration, pests, disease) early via ultrasound signatures. “We are building the world’s first bioacoustic plant database. Plants emit sound and ultrasound… when they’re being stressed. We… analyze them and train our machine learning models.”
- Valuation Discipline: Dilution Guardrails Drove Target. They reverse-engineered valuation from needed cash and dilution bands (15–20%) using early benchmarks, keeping founder ownership healthy for future rounds. “ So we actually went through there’s a broken cap table, like something from backing minds that shows like what’s the best case, and or an average case, and then a bad case of how much diluted you can be or should be. So we looked a little bit on that to get a sense of where we should be and what phase we are in. We looked at trying to get a, not be diluted more than 20% in this first round, and looking for maybe between 15 and 20.”
Link to Apple Podcast here.
Catch the full podcast series here.
