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Fabas: Anik Thaler shares how to get funded in 2024

Investment Climate Podcast: Fundraising Playbooks From Food Tech CEOs and VCs 

In this podcast series, co-produced by vegconomist, 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 6: Fabas: Anik Thaler shares how to get funded in 2024

In this episode, Alex talked to Anik, co-founder of Fabas Foods, which develops ingredient systems for amazing dairy alternatives. The talk focuses on the journey of securing investment for a food tech startup, including the challenges and decisions involved in raising capital. Overall, it discusses the challenges and strategies involved in fundraising, the importance of investor relationships, and the pivotal decisions that shaped the company’s direction.

Key Facts Fabas:

• Goal: To change the way we eat in the future by bringing more beans onto our fields and plates.
• Recently closed seed round over CHF 1.3 million led by Swiss family office and some corporate investors.

Alex’s Top Findings:

1. Cold Outreach does not work especially when trying to get into Family Offices. When being asked if she ever heard of a family office in the past or already knew and then were looking for a warm connection, Anik answered “No, that's the thing with the family office. Normally they are not that present in public, maybe as other VCs who normally have websites and have LinkedIn profiles. So most family offices don't have that. You need to know some people who already know them, which makes it much harder actually to access  those.”
2. Be prepared to Pivot. “So as we raised our first CLA, so what we call then pre seed, we've been focused on building a B2C brand. So we started with a portfolio of B2C products. We made some hummus products, some burgers, and falafel. Always with the vision to bring more pulses onto our plates, but then we quickly realized that it's not just about launching new products to the market and having maybe a bit nicer taste with more locally produced products, but to rather really improve them. There we saw that the ingredients that are currently used are one of the biggest challenges to overcome. So that's when we started to focus more on ingredient development ourselves and then pivot towards a B2B ingredient supplier.” she added.
3. Speed to market is key in today's environment.  “Our technology is based around extraction and fermentation, but we work with pulses, meaning fava beans, peas, chickpeas. All those sources are not novel food and the process itself neither which makes it much easier to access the market quickly.” Anik said on being asked if they are on novel foods.