On the 16M CHF Series A, licensing IP to sugar giants,& bypassing CapEx-Charles Pontvianne,Planetary

Episode 101: Planetary: Charles Pontvianne on the 16M CHF Series A, licensing IP to sugar giants, and bypassing CapEx 

In this episode, I sit down with Charles Pontvianne, CFO of Planetary, a Swiss biotech startup that recently announced a massive 16 million CHF Series A co-led by Radical Capital and Oetker Group. Charles breaks down their highly unusual "middleman" equity story: instead of building their own massive fermentation facilities, Planetary licenses their biomanufacturing IP directly to legacy sugar producers, utilizing their existing infrastructure to upcycle sucrose side-streams into high-protein B2B ingredients. We discuss how Planetary successfully navigated the dreaded "Food-for-Fuel" ethical bottleneck by producing "Food-for-Food," and how getting retail giant Aldi to reorder their vegan chicken fillet was the ultimate commercial derisking mechanism for their Series A investors. 

🎧 Listen to the full episode to hear Charles explain the exact structure of their data room and why treating your fundraise like selling a house is critical to creating VC FOMO. 

Key Facts Planetary:

• Charles Pontvianne: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlespontvianne/
• Website: https://www.planetarygroup.ch/
• Headquarters: Switzerland 
• Goal: To act as the missing link between industrial agriculture and FoodTech by licensing biomanufacturing IP to global carbohydrate/sugar producers, upcycling their sucrose side-streams into Mycoprotein ingredients for the B2B market.
• Milestone: Closed a 16 million CHF Series A (co-led by Radical Capital and Oetker Group) while successfully scaling up a 50 cubic meter fermentation plant in Switzerland and launching a Mycoprotein-based vegan chicken fillet in Aldi.

Blurb

PLANETARY is a Swiss full-stack fermentation platform building and operating a global network of biomanufacturing facilities. Their proprietary BioBlocks™ fermentation and AI platform handles scale-up, process optimization, and production across three verticals: mycoprotein ingredients, precision fermentation-derived products, and bio-based materials. They are infrastructure-as-a-service for the bioeconomy — clients access Planetary's facilities, platform, and expertise to get fermentation-based products to market with optimized COGS and sustainability metrics.