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 52: The Protein Brewery
In this episode, Alex sits down with Thijs Bosch, the new CEO of The Protein Brewery—a Dutch biomass-fermentation scale-up making a mycelium-based protein-and-fiber powder for food and nutrition. Fresh off a €30M Series B led by Invest-NL and BOM with continued support from existing backers (including Novo Holdings), Thijs explains how he stepped in mid-process to close a 15-month fundraise while steering a strategic pivot from alt-meat into active nutrition and healthy aging. He’s candid on valuation realities, why an eventual strategic exit is likelier than IPO, and what the team needs next: U.S. partners in sports/active nutrition and wellness ready to trial at industrial scale.
Key Facts The Protein Brewery:
- Goal: Healthier and more sustainable fats to deliver tasty, more nutritious foods.
- Recently closed €30M Series B led by Invest-NL and BOM with continued support from existing backers (including Novo Holdings).
Alex’s Top Findings:
- Investor Conviction: Customers Spoke During DD. Letting brand R&D/marketing validate taste/texture/use-case to investors beat vanity pipeline charts. “Get those customers and those promoters to talk to your investors during the commercial due diligence. That has been very helpful.”
- New CEO, Same Raise: Leadership Switch Mid-Process. Thijs joined five months ago and finished a 15-month fundraise already in motion—while investors assessed the new plan. “ I joined the protein brewery about five months ago. I’m new to the company, and I basically dropped in the middle of the fundraising process. I took over from the former CEO. We had to close the fundraising rounds with both the current and new investors.”
- Sustainability Still Matters (Even If It’s “Hygiene”). Fermentation’s land/water/CO₂ footprint remains a core part of The Protein Brewery’s investment and customer story. “ Nowadays, it’s a ticket to the table or it’s a hygiene factor for many scale-ups, but fermentation technology as such, and especially if you do it in a minimal process way, requires a fraction of the land, a fraction of the water, a fraction of the CO2, etc. Also, for all of our investors, it’s still a key point. Sometimes it gets a bit overshadowed in the current discussions, but for a lot of investors, it is still very important.”
Link to Apple Podcast here.
Catch the full podcast series here.
