Decameal: Leander Hessner 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 49: Decameal: Leander Hessner shares how to get funded in 2025
This episode features Leander Hessner, marine biologist and CEO/co-founder of Decameal, which upcycles invasive European green crabs and crustacean side streams into high-value feed ingredients. Leander explains how Decameal moved beyond “crab protein” to a patented separation process that yields a clean protein concentrate plus shell-derived compounds, landing pilot production inside a major Danish fish-feed company’s facility. After product trials with that partner performed well, the corporate came in as the largest check—unlocking a €700k equity round (without a formal lead) and a €1.4M Danish state grant to scale. We dig into supply security (the biomass is vast), sustainability that pencils out on price, and a path to a profitable pilot by 2027 before a CapEx-heavy scale round. Leander closes with what helps most now: intros to North American shellfish processors, feed/ingredient players, and licensing partners.
Key Facts Decameal:
- Goal: Restoring a healthy marine life through a sustainable business model.
- Recently unlocked a €700k equity round (without a formal lead) and a €1.4M Danish state grant to scale.
Alex’s Top Findings:
- Reality Check: Price & Function Beat “Green.” Sustainability alone won’t win the deal; unit economics and performance drive buying and investing decisions. ”You should probably start your pitch deck by showing your budget rather than showing your sustainability profile, because that's, in most cases, what the investors want to see. They want to know if you can actually make something that's profitable, and if it's also sustainable, then that's a plus, but it's not gonna secure you a green premium, as it's called. I had a firm belief in that in the beginning, but as I've gotten further in the process, now we've raised two times, and we've talked to many customers, it's all about the pricing and the function of what you're actually doing. That was a big surprise for me.”
- Valuation: Cap Table Health + Evidence. First round priced on potential; second round tied to production, timing, revenue paths, and maintaining founder ownership. " We had reached a suitable valuation from the first round that all the investors agreed to, and that would be healthy for our cap table. At that point, it's all about the potential. We didn't have much more than a product, and maybe someone who was willing to say what they were, wanted to pay for it. So the valuation at the first round was, the arguments for that weren't very strong, but we made it work anyway. The evaluation for the second round was a bit more rooted in what we can actually produce, when we can sell it, how much we can sell, and what the revenue will be. Of course, the progress that we had made since the first round and also the soft funding that we had gotten while in between the two rounds, played a big role as well.”
- De-Risk with Trials First, Capital Follows. Product samples and fish-feed trials with a major corporate validated performance—then that corporate joined the round. " Last year, we did some trials with them, fish feed trials, where the
