Oyster Bay Venture Capital: Felix Leonhardt shares how to get funded in 2026

Oyster Bay Venture Capital: Felix Leonhardt shares how to get funded in 2026

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 62:Oyster Bay Venture Capital: Felix Leonhardt shares how to get funded in 2026

In this episode, I sat down with Felix Leonhardt, Partner at Oyster Bay Venture Capital, to unpack what it really looks like to raise and run a €100M+ impact food/ag fund in today’s market—and how founders can learn from the GP playbook. We got into why they deliberately built a “proof-of-partnership” SPV between Fund I and Fund II (four concentrated deals), why they sized Fund II around having enough firepower to lead seed, lead/co-lead Series A, and still follow into B, and how painful “errors of omission” (not being able to follow on) shaped their strategy. Felix broke down fundraising as a pure sales funnel (ICP, pipeline, conversions) and explained why “two years is normal” when LPs are trusting you for a decade—plus the unique frustration that funds don’t create urgency until the very end. Finally, we talked about why their LP base is heavily food-industry operators (mid-sized, capital-rich businesses who feel disruption directly), why that doesn’t limit their investing (because it matches their thesis), and what they want most from the community: more high-quality deal flow that can genuinely move the food system forward.

Key Facts Oyster Bay Venture Capital:

• Goal: Team up with the rare founders who disrupt the food system for the better.

Alex’s Top Findings:

1. Fundraising a Fund Is Still Just Sales (Treat It Like a Funnel). Felix frames fund fundraising the same way he sold vegan ice cream: define your ICP, build a pipeline, work the funnel. The mindset shift matters—LPs are giving you money for ~10 years, so a 2-year sales cycle is normal, not a failure. That realism keeps you consistent instead of being emotionally reactive. ”  Now I think any fundraising process is a sales process. It's a funnel. I have a customer profile, and I have different sorts of customer segments. I just need to understand which ones are the most likely ones to convert and obviously focus on these and build a pipeline of leads that we can target.”
2. The Real Lesson From Fund I: Under-Following Is the Most Expensive Mistake. Oyster Bay VC didn’t size Fund II bigger for ego—they sized it so they could lead, follow on, and have governance strength. Fund I picked strong companies, but the fund was too small to keep firepower for follow-ons, which cost upside. They also saw cases where being a small investor meant watching “wrong” decisions without leverage to influence outcomes. “The error of omission… is the most costly and most painful one… we missed out on a lot of upside because we couldn’t follow on.”
3. Your Best LPs Might Not Be “Institutional LPs” (Food Industry Families > Traditional Fund Allocators). They learned that many classic institutional fund allocators weren’t the match: the fund is “too small” for them and the sector is niche. Instead, Oyster Bay’s best-fit LP base became mid-sized to large food-industry owners/operators who feel disruption, don’t have big innovation departments, and value access to dealflow + insight. “We learned quite quickly that… traditional fund investors are n