Investment Climate Podcast: Emile Redant of Zymofix, How to Get Funded in 2025 – vegconomist
In this podcast series, Alex Shandrovsky interviews investors about benchmarks for funding alt proteins in 2024 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.
Episode 13: Zymofix: Emile Redant
In this episode, Alex talked to Emile Redant, co-founder and CEO of Zymofix, an ag-tech company developing a new way to produce microorganisms, which are mainly being used in agriculture and other non-food, non-animal feed types of applications. Emile shares how Zymofix raised $2 million in seed funding from the High Tech Gründer Fund and two regenerative agriculture-focused family offices. The initial connection to the investors was through an accelerator program, Biotope, where Emile was mentored by Johan Boterman, a former Bayer executive.
Key Facts Zymofix:
- Goal: Turning biomass residues into fit-for-purpose microbial fertilizers, biostimulants and biocontrols.
- Recently raised $2 million led by High Tech Gründer Fund.
Alex’s Top Findings:
- Rejection of Product Development Objections. Many investors wanted Zymofix to focus on product development, but the founder resisted this in favor of a more sustainable, lower-risk approach. “ Everybody wanted us to do product development…I was very, very strongly against that. It is really a high risk type of investment. A lot of those companies never make it, never actually bring products to the market. I’ve worked at a couple of those companies and it’s something I didn’t want to do because it takes a tremendous amount of investment money to do that with a really low chance of success.” Emile said.
- Realistic Business Vision. Zymofix avoids high-risk product development, choosing instead to collaborate with corporates to manufacture their top-selling products using innovative methods. As Emile shared, “We are not developing a product by ourselves. We are doing joint development with these corporations to show we can make it with better quality at a way lower cost.”
- Low-Cost Manufacturing Strategy. Zymofix’s strategy to keep CAPEX low while still developing a scalable manufacturing process differentiates them from other biotechs that require massive investments for large-scale plants.” We’ve designed it in a way where we can be economical at a small scale of three to four million… and that gives us a lot more flexibility to just go ahead and do it.”
Link to Apple Podcast here.
Catch the full podcast series here.
