Oyster Bay Venture Capital

Last week, we held our first Portfolio Day since we launched Fund II 🌊 This year, we invited all our investors, founding teams, partners, and friends to take stock and, above all, to look ahead to the coming years. As a food VC, we of course can not invite without organizing some delicious food by our portfolio companies. 😄 Super grateful that most of our founders showed up and gave our investors an inside view into their companies. Challenges they faced and how they have overcome them so far. Of course, it was also about numbers (how could it not be), but the focus was on exchanging ideas and thinking about how we can promote even more impact in the food sector in the future. NuKoKo, Peas of Heaven, LA VIE™ and Hooked Foods provided us with samples of their products from alternative cocoa to sausages, bacon and chicken (all plant based). The evening before, goodBytz’ robot had served our investors a 4-course menu. (Felix will be writing about this in detail on his account soon). Thanks Heike and Elise for organizing this Portfolio Day and thanks to all our guests for many interesting discussions. See you in 2025! #PortfolioDay #Investment #Startup #Founder #FoodIndustry

New month, new meetups 🌊 In October, our crew will once again be traveling around Europe from Hamburg. This time, London, Budapest and Rome are on the agenda. Take a look through the slideshow and talk to us on site if you are traveling to the same events. Felix, Divya, Philip, Elise and Flynn look forward to getting to know you. We are big fans of face to face 🤝 #MeetUs #Food #FoodTech #Startups #Inevstors #GetToKnow

As the startup scene in the food sector grows, so do we too! And so we welcome our new crew member Divya Murthy. It's great to have you with us. Divya will be part of our investment team as a principal. Divya spent the past couple of years at ProVeg, where she was Head of Investments. Thus, she knows the food ecosystem globally very well.  As an experienced investment manager, she will be a great addition to our team, where she will use her skills to advance Oyster Bay. The timing is also good with Divya: we went on our team retreat last week, which she was able to join directly. Now we are a team of 9 great people. We are happy that we can sustainably and increasingly strengthen the food startup world. #NewCrewMember #Team #Growth #TeamCulture #People

Do you want to invest in the food sector? Do you want to set up an AgTech or food startup? Are you interested in venture capital? 🌊 Talk to us about it in person. Here you will find our locations and dates for September, when you can meet us. From now on, the format will be regular. We are big fans of face to face meetings! Where can we meet you? #VentureCapital #Founder #Investor #MeetUp #MeetTheCrew

𝗧𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗶𝗰 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗴𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿. 𝗔 𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗼𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝗳𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗹𝘆 𝗼𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁. Lots of people want to invest with impact - but it's complex to get started. ESG does not equal impact. The regulatory framework is complex. Lots of funds are advertising with green claims and labels and little to back it up. So networks like Toniic that spend time and resources actually doing the research are extremely valuable. They enable impact driven investors to find ways to invest with a positive impact - and take a lot of the hassle out of the process. We were lucky enough to be introduced to Toniic by Michael Viegener. After a first call and several exchanges on our impact strategy, we uploaded our fund on their platform. This generated enough interest for a call where we presented fund II, to Toniic members in person. And after this - we are thankful to have gained LPs for our fund through Toniic. The transition to a sustainable food system is urgent, important, and technologically feasible. From bio-based solutions to automation and AI to robotics - we are seeing highly technical solutions to important problems being developed by great founders in Germany and Europe. Despite the size and scope of the sector, European Venture Capital entered the Food & AgTech sector only within the last 8 years and in 2023, Food- & AgTech only received 8% of all climate related funding. So the opportunity is rife. And it's great to have communities and facilitators like Toniic and Julien Gafarou moving the investment world forward. #VentureCapital #Food #AgTech #Investment #Capital #Future

🍫 Our recent Investment is all about saving chocolate. The cocoa-industry is facing a lot of challenges: ➡️ High CO2 footprint ➡️ Limited cultivation areas worldwide and due to climate change the harvest are getting worse and worse every year ➡️ Humanitarian Issues like Child Labor ➡️ Rising and volatile prices of Cocoa, making chocolate more and more expensive Sounds awful, right? I mean, we all love chocolate and imagine a world without it - what a nightmare! But no worries, our latest investment is here so help: NuKoKo makes chocolate cocoa-free by replicating the fermentation process, that changes cocoa into chocolate – but they do it with beans they find locally in the UK instead of cocoa beans. That makes the chocolate not just healthier, but also dramatically less impactful on the environment. And big plus: Ross Newton and Kit Tomlinson are second time Founders. They were already running a successful chocolate company in the UK, before they started Nukoko. They then added David as the technical co-founder, complementing their chocolate industry experience. That makes them an incredible founding team for the following reasons: And even bigger plus: they have a strong British sense of humor – and we love that, just as much as we love chocolate 🙂 We are very happy to be part of their journey! #chocolate #VentureCapital #fermentation

You can meet our Managing Partner Felix Leonhardt at the German Fermentation Summit this week on Thursday! Fermentation really is an interesting topic in the food industry with a major impact on carbon emissions.

Today, Felix Leonhardt talks in his post about why we place so much value on the founding team in our investments - Check it out!

Felix shared some thoughts on how to build your data room today- really important knowledge for founders!

Oyster Bay is growing. We invest in impact driven start-ups across the food value chain. The interesting question is often - what does impact management and measurement actually mean? Well, we're finding out! To build our impact strategy and framework, we are very happy to have Ragne Maasel join Oyster Bay. Ragne has spent the past six years managing the ESG team and program in a large financial institution in Estonia, and now she's ready to dive into the world of impact investing. "There’s no growth without impact and no impact without growth. The biggest misconception I’ve encountered in regards to ESG and impact, is that it is somehow isolated from the actual business case nor is it something that needs to be tackled separately from growing the company. And at the end of the day, building companies with real-life positive impact boils down to people as well as your capacity to foresee the future." Favorite foods? Anything vegetarian and spicy. Can’t-breathe-properly kind of spicy. And then on the other spectrum of foods I love are rather bland traditional Estonian foods like whipped semolina pudding or raw salted fish with new potatoes and butter. Most interesting start-ups you have seen? Startups that make you go - wow, this is such a simple idea, how come no one has thought of it before ? I’m fascinated by innovation, but sometimes really simple, down to earth ideas that tackle everyday problems that are executed creatively and to perfection are most awe-inspiring. What are you most excited about right now? Spring to arrive. There’s something special about new beginnings.