Koppie: Daan Raemdonck shares how to get funded in 2025

Koppie: Daan Raemdonck 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 42: Koppie: Daan Raemdonck shares how to get funded in 2025

In this episode, I speak with Daan Raemdonck, founder and CEO of Koppie, a Belgium-based startup developing fermented coffee alternatives to help safeguard the future of the coffee ritual. Daan shares how Koppie raised its pre-seed round led by Nucleus Capital, with follow-on investment from Mudcake, Rockstar, and angel investors—all through warm intros while in stealth. We unpack how Q-grader testing validated their product against market alternatives, why they pivoted their go-to-market during the raise, and how early grant funding in Belgium helped extend runway pre-fundraise. Daan also opens up about valuation benchmarking, handling objections around market history, and the mindset that helped him stay emotionally grounded through the fundraising journey.

Key Facts Koppie:

• Goal: To help safeguard the future of the coffee ritual.
• Recently raised its pre-seed round led by Nucleus Capital, with follow-on investment from Mudcake, Rockstar, and angel investors.

Alex’s Top Findings:

1. Warm Intros Are Everything in Stealth. Koppie raised its pre-seed round entirely through warm introductions while still in stealth mode. ”Almost everything has been a warm introduction. So I think there have been very few, especially since we're pre-seed. So we were actually in stealth. It doesn't happen in stealth mode to have a non-war intro that leads to something. All of our investors, whether it was Mudcake or Rockstar, have all been warm introductions by someone else who then either invested as an angel or just wasn't part of the round in the end.
2. Outperformed Competitors in Independent Taste Test. A blind test by certified Q-graders validated the product, helping build conviction internally and with investors. " We had an independent test done over the summer of 2024, and in that independent test, we outperformed all the alternatives we could source in Europe. That's for me the reason to stop all activities and to say, ‘okay, now I'm going all in on this,’ what used to be at that point, just a random idea.”
3. Reverse Due Diligence on Investors. Daan assessed investor quality based on how well they challenged the team during early calls. “ The first call is where you're trying to pitch your startup, but you're also listening to the questions they ask. Unanimously with all the investors, we're now on board. We found the interview to be interesting as well. What is also interesting is that we felt that they asked the right questions, in-depth questions, and they understood what we were trying to do. They asked the right follow-up questions without being anal about it. But they challenged our thinking, and they pushed us forward during the interview. Those are the investors you want.”