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Loopworm: Ankit Bagaria shares how to get funded in 2025

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

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 43: Loopworm: Ankit Bagaria shares how to get funded in 2025

In this episode, I talk with Ankit Alok Bagaria, co-founder and CEO of Loopworm, a Bangalore-based biotech startup using insect-based systems to produce high-value proteins for nutrition, diagnostics, and biopharma. Ankit shares how Loopworm raised a $3.25M pre-Series A round led by WaterBridge Ventures and Japan’s Enrission India Capital, and how they built investor conviction around a new recombinant protein platform—while continuing to scale a profitable animal nutrition business. We dive into using silkworms as living bioreactors, building hyper-prepared data rooms, navigating biotech objections in India’s VC landscape, and why Loopworm is designed as a long-term insect biotech platform—not just an insect protein startup.

Key Facts Loopworm:

• Goal: To redefine how industries approach nutrition, health, and wellness by maximising the value of insects across various applications.
• Recently raised $3.4M in seed funding led by WaterBridge Ventures and Enrission India Capital.

Alex’s Top Findings:

1. Existing Investors Can Be the Best Lead Investors. Loopworm’s pre-Series A was led by WaterBridge Ventures, an existing investor who doubled down because of strong business performance and a promising new vertical. ” So we already knew Water Bridge Ventures from before. We have been in touch with them for the last three years. They also participated and invested in our seed round. So they have doubled down in this round with us, which shows a lot of confidence from existing investors. Obviously, they were much more aware in terms of the progress at Loopworm in terms of what we were trying to achieve, the major breakthrough that we got with our recombinant protein platform. That is where I think that confidence came in, where they straightaway gave us a commitment like when we started raising our funds in this round, and then we got a hold of new investors coming in as well.”
2. Cold Outreach Can Land Strategic Investors. Japanese investor was sourced via a short LinkedIn message emphasizing traction and capital already committed. "I saw news… fund is actively looking at investments in India… reached out on LinkedIn. Japan can be a great market for us, since we work with silkworms. I essentially reached out to them on LinkedIn, stating, ‘I am raising a $3 million round with $1.5 million in commitments. Happy to connect,’ they replied, ‘Glad to get connected. Let's get on a call. Looks interesting.’”
3. Data Room & Preparedness Shortened Due Diligence. Ankit prepared questions, hyperlinked Q&A in Google Drive, plus factory and process videos, and accelerated the close. “ From our last seed round of investment, what I learned was that it's better to be prepared with all the data rooms, FAQs, etc. So I can essentially predict the hundred questions that an investor would ask me and create supporting documents for them. From a financial due diligence and a legal due diligence perspective, even from an ESG due diligence perspective, we h