Prefer: Jake Berber shares how to get funded in 2025

Prefer: Jake Berber 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 44: Prefer: Jake Berber shares how to get funded in 2025

This episode of the Investor Climate Podcast features a return conversation with Jake Berber, co-founder and CEO of Prefer, who just closed an oversubscribed $4.2M pre-A round to future-proof climate-threatened crops starting with coffee and cocoa. Jake walks through the full fundraising playbook—from building a transparent non-NDA data room and leveraging warm intros, to overcoming MOU skepticism with conservative revenue modeling and positioning IP licensing as a capital-light growth driver. He shares candid lessons from six months of 20+ investor calls per week, a 1.5% conversion rate, and how the round came together with co-leads At One Ventures and Chancery Hill Capital. The discussion blends tactical fundraising insights with founder resilience, showing what it takes to raise in today’s tougher climate tech market.

Key Facts Prefer:

• Goal: To future-proof food & beverage, starting with coffee and chocolate.
• Recently closed an oversubscribed $4.2M pre-A round co-led by At One Ventures and Chancery Hill Capital.

Alex’s Top Findings:

1. Funnel Management: Brutal Conversion Rates. Out of 500+ reachouts, only three checks closed (~1.5%). Jake emphasizes grit and volume. "We had 200 venture capital funds, CVCs, EVCS, government agencies, and family offices in our CRM that we had spoken with. So we had over 200 different entities that we spoke with that were interested in raising money and took a call with us. In terms of people who reached out, I'm guessing 500 plus. I would say 50% of them opted into a non NDA data room and 20 20% opted into the full NDA data room. "
2. Warm Intros Are Non-Negotiable. Fundraising = sales. Investors judge founders by their ability to secure warm introductions. " I think that investors want to see that you are a good enough salesperson to get a warm introduction to them. I bring it back to sales because what we've learned in our industry, being a B2B food tech company, is that a warm introduction to a customer is infinitely more effective than a cold reach out to a customer. And so good investors know that if you're able to get a warm introduction to me, the investor, that means that you can get a warm introduction to the customer. If you can get warm introductions to customers, you are a better salesperson, and in turn, you have a chance of having better revenue as a company. So I bring it back to just showing a skillset of being able to get connected with people. I'm sure there's data around a higher rate of first call via warm introduction versus cold. I'm sure that's out there, but I don't have exact numbers on it."
3. Data Room Strategy: Radical Transparency. Jake used a non-NDA data room with nearly everything except customer names and IP details to accelerate diligence. "The only difference in our NDA data room versus non-NDA data room is customer names and IP information. We keep our forward-looking financial model in there. We keep in MOU amounts, but we redact all contracts of names or anything. So you can still see the structure of the MOUs, that there's a signature on there that they're legitimate