Seaqure Labs: Johan Henriksson shares how to get funded in 2025

Seaqure Labs: Johan Henriksson 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 54: Seaqure Labs: Johan Henriksson shares how to get funded in 2025

In this episode, I sit down with Johan Henriksson, CEO & Co-founder of Seaqure Labs, on a mission to make aquaculture impact-positive with mycelium. Fresh off a €470K pre-seed (led by Sweden’s Almi with angel consortia), Seaqure is scaling mycelium-based “Myprotein” feed ingredients via solid-state fermentation, aiming to replace fishmeal/soy with a cost-competitive, sustainable, drop-in alternative. We dig into how early coffee chats with a regional investor matured into a round, why sector-agnostic local funds beat pan-EU agri VC for pre-seed, the Swedish “teacher’s exemption” that streamlined their spin-out from Chalmers, and the plan to decentralize production near sidestreams for scale. If you’re a fish farmer or feed company curious about trials—or just fungi-curious—this one’s for you. 

Key Facts Seaqure Labs:

• Goal: To make aquaculture impact-positive with mycelium.
• Recently raised €470K pre-seed led by Sweden’s Almi with angel consortia.

Alex’s Top Findings:

1. Local, sector-agnostic capital closed faster than EU agri-food VCs. Seaqure Labs began by pitching pan-European agri-food investors but learned many were either stage-mismatched, reserving capital for portfolios, or already “full” in a given fermentation modality. Shifting to Swedish, sector-agnostic investors with a clear business-model story accelerated the round. “ We had many dual paths as a fundraising strategy. So to be honest, we started off having a fully European VC-focused. So we've basically been around for a bit more than a year. But they did help us after we pivoted into looking more at regional and Swedish investors. So we did get good introductions to different angel investors, angel consortia, and potential VCs that are investing in AgriFood tech.”
2. Smart use of non-dilutive ‘startup debt’ to bridge to pre-seed. A low-risk regional loan covered early salaries and project work, repaid only as revenues/profits arrive—buying time to run a disciplined pre-seed process.“There is something called… a regional loan… You can borrow… It’s a very low-risk loan… once you start generating revenue… You also start paying off this loan slowly.”
3. Valuation: milestone-based, maturity-driven, not headline chasing. At pre-seed, they avoided inflated valuations seen in earlier European markets and aligned expectations with the current environment. The round was sized to fund key proofs (scalability, trials), accepting slightly higher dilution for realistic next-round readiness. “ We had a thought of slightly higher rounds and valuations in pre-seed… but we realized the market has changed… what matters is proving capability to the next round.”