Tastewise: Alon Chen shares how to get funded in 2025

Tastewise: Alon Chen 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 40: Tastewise: Alon Chen shares how to get funded in 2025

In this episode, I speak with Alon Chen, co-founder and CEO of Tastewise, a generative AI platform powering sales and marketing for the food and beverage industry. Alon shares how Tastewise raised a $50M Series B led by Telus, and breaks down their playbook for building deep investor relationships, bridging rounds with strategics, and maintaining valuation discipline. We talk about the difference between selling AI and selling food tech, the importance of multithreaded fundraising conversations, and why founder community matters more than any book when navigating hard decisions.

Key Facts Tastewise:

• Goal: To  help the food industry to  digitize and automate their go-to market from accepting new products, to creating and generating more demand for their products, to enabling their sales team to be more successful in placing products on the shelf and the menu.
• Recently   raised a $50M Series B led by Telus.

Alex’s Top Findings:

1. Bridge Round as Strategic Onboarding. Two external industry players joined a bridge round before the Series B—including Telus—allowing time for mutual diligence and relationship building. " So the thing with Telus was that they actually joined our bridge round before leading the round. So that allowed us to get to know one another better, see the dynamics, get to see how the businesses are performing, and build a more meaningful relationship. Sometimes you have to do the bridge just to bring your money in and to extend the runway. We actually brought two new external investors that we thought were extremely important for the future of the company, and one of them actually ended up leading the round."
2. Protect Against Overvaluation Temptation. Alon cautions founders about inflated valuations in early rounds that lead to pain down the road for teams, customers, and investors. "I know the other way to grow with your valuation, not grow into your valuation. So raising money for that will get you into trouble because the evaluation is inflated. Will necessarily mean that you're gonna be disappointing your employees, your shareholders, and maybe your future investors are gonna be happy because you recapped yourself.  The idea is to think about your business in the long term and not to get tempted. By the way, a lot of money in the early days corrupted a lot of companies 'cause you're not focused, you are trying to double and triple your team every year.”
3. Good SaaS is Good SaaS—Even in Foodtech. Despite AgriFoodTech volatility, Tastewise stands out with traditional SaaS metrics: high NDR, low churn, strong growth, and margin. “ SaaS businesses are very easy to manage if you're focusing on the essentials, which is ‘Do I really generate revenue? Is my product sticky enough? Am I able to grow my portfolio?’ And I think we happen to be a software solution in the food industry. We're an enterprise software solution. We are attending agritech and food tech conferences, but essentially we're actually like a marketing cloud for the food industry. Where we feel, we think there is a hundred billion dollars of addressable market for us,