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Oceanloop: Fabian Riedel shares how to get funded in 2024

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 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. This podcast is syndicated through our media partners; Foodtech Weekly and Vegconomist.

Episode 8: Oceanloop: Fabian Riedel shares how to get funded in 2024

In this episode, Alex talked to Fabian, Founder and CEO of Oceanloop, a food tech company which develops and scales up a platform technology to farm fish or seafood land-based anywhere in the world. The discussion highlights the fundraising approach which emphasizes a strategic blend of equity and venture debt to scale operations. The conversation delved into the broader fundraising strategy to scale up sustainable shrimp farming and build a robust seafood business ecosystem.

Key Facts Oceanloop:

• Goal: To contribute to the growing demand of animal proteins with a sustainable, land-based aquaculture technology, offering a viable alternative to wild fishing and traditional aquaculture.
• Recently raised $35 Million from European Investment Bank

Alex’s Top Findings:

1. Look out alternative funding sources like venture debt. “The venture debt program is without any securities like you usually have to provide when you talk about a classical bank financing. They have a certain interest rate that can be high when you are very successful, but in general, that is a very fair program—big upside for equity investors because the EIB takes on part of the risk.” Fabian answered on being asked about venture debt and its structure.
2. Focus on the product that is primarily imported in the country. “So the main part is white tiger prawns that are farmed in Southeast Asia or South America are imported to Europe. Shrimp  a high demand protein. In total, the demand for shrimp is growing heavily. Shrimp is the most important seafood in the world. There, there are 5 million tons of shrimp farms every year. So the idea is why don't we use technology and innovation to farm that species? So we plan to have a fully independent, highly automated and software controlled environment for farming. That's a high value species, also highly important.” Fabian discussed how they came up with the technology.
3. Started a D2C Marketplace for your product types to build a direct relationship with the customer. “I kind of bootstrapped within my company where we introduced other high quality seafood products under our roof. We sold exclusively in Germany and Austria. This is how everything started then this business grew and now we have 300 seafood. So it's a seafood platform and it's an e-commerce business. So we sell D2C and send to private customers every day in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, our seafood products, and we source those products from the whole world.” Fabian shared during the podcast.