Orbisk: Olaf van der Veen

Orbisk: Olaf van der Veen 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 11: Orbisk: Olaf van der Veen shares how to get funded in 2024

In this episode, Alex talked to Olaf, co-founder and CEO of Orbisk, who help professional kitchens to reduce the food service sector and parallel industries of their food waste issues and thus improve their sustainability and profitability. Olaf's talk provides valuable insights into navigating venture capital, building trust with investors, creating strong customer relationships, and using innovative business models to fund hardware in the SaaS space. It highlights how clarity, purpose-driven action, and strong stakeholder relationships contribute to successful fundraising.

Key Facts Orbisk:

• Goal: To make the world food system more sustainable.
• Recently raised €8M lead by Regeneration VC and Peakbridge

Alex’s Top Findings:

1. Having strong product traction and growth helps in securing investors, even when there are setbacks in fundraising. “  We were in a fortunate position that we're on a pretty good growth trajectory. That makes a whole lot of conversations a lot easier. Even irrespective of this series A, we were in a position where we would have the company go well without the investment. We are at a point that's not far from cashflow neutrality and positivity. It's just that our growth ambitions wouldn't be met. So that makes the conversation a whole lot easier.”
2. The importance of choosing the right lead investor who actively participates in fundraising and provides clear structure. " That is basically what I should have recognized earlier.  As a lead, you expect to really take the lead in this round, to provide clarity in the round, sort of boundaries, process,  provide structure and clarity."
3. Being hyper transparent is important. "  As a company and as a founder, I always promised myself and everyone around me also that hyper transparency that I'm asking for in others." Olaf promised.