About this opportunity
If you’re keen on building your own venture in food, agriculture, and climate-tech, we want to hear from you.
We are seeking ambitious founders ready to co-build ventures that will define the future of Southeast Asia’s food, agriculture, and climate landscape. You’ll be responsible for leading the business, but you won’t be doing it alone. From day one, you’ll collaborate with our experienced team of venture builders, a network of scientists, and industry experts. We’ll ideate, validate, and launch the venture together.
We are open to various backgrounds - whether you are a scientist, engineer, senior-level operator, or former founder. Our goal is to help you build your venture that not only achieves commercial success but also delivers a meaningful, lasting impact on the food, agriculture, and climate landscape.
We are keen to hear from you whether you have an initial idea or not. Some themes we are excited about:
- Productivity and Yield Enhancement: Innovative solutions to increase agricultural productivity and improve efficiency.
- Climate Resilience and Sustainability: Enhance resilience to climate change and support nature-based mitigation and adaptation.
- Post-Harvest Losses: Midstream solutions to food quality and safety, logistics, storage, and food processing.
- Farmer Income and Market Access: Improve equity in the value chain and empower farmers towards a living income.
- Agro and Food Waste & Circular Economy: Creating sustainable, circular models for reducing waste and maximizing resource use.
- Alternative and New Food, Feed and Ingredients: Exploring innovative, sustainable food, feed, and ingredient solutions to meet future demands.
What we will do together in 4-6 months:
- Identify and validate opportunity spaces in food, agriculture, and climate by evaluating the value chain, uncovering pain points, and ideating solutions.
- Build prototypes to test and iterate the solution and business model with actual stakeholders in-market and secure your first pilot customers.
- Craft the business case and execution plan to pitch our investment committee, securing pre-seed investment for launch.
- Founder owns the startup post-investment and leads its growth while we continue to provide financial, operational, and strategic support.
Why collaborate with us:
- We foster the art and science of entrepreneurship. As an independent entity, you hold a unique position in our program, distinct from incubators with predefined cohorts. You are the core player, and our role is to empower you. The founding team retains majority shares, ensuring the venture is ultimately your company.
- Our dedicated team offers comprehensive financial, operational, and strategic support to validate your business model and establish your venture. This includes expertise in Growth & Go-to-Market strategy, Fundraising, Talent Acquisition, as well as Marketing & PR.
- To help you focus on your venture, we provide monthly financial support to cover essential living expenses. Additionally, our support extends to assisting you in hiring co-founders and key early-stage team members.
- By joining our network, you gain access to Atlantic Labs & FoodLabs, comprising over 180+ portfolio companies. Our scientific, tech, and entrepreneurial community offer valuable advice and mentorship.
- Count on our unwavering commitment. We stand by our founders throughout the long-term journey of building a successful venture.
What we value in a founder:
- Impact: If you're driven to make a significant impact by tackling pressing challenges and instigating transformative change in the food, agriculture, and climate value chain, we wholeheartedly back your vision.
- Hustle: Flourishing in a dynamic, high-speed setting, you thrive on rapid iterations and have an inherent bias toward taking action. Your unwavering determination pushes you forward.
- Curiosity: Embracing ambiguity, you constantly seek new ways to challenge the status quo and revolutionize the industry.
- Experience: Your ideas and passion are complemented by hands-on experience. You have thrived in demanding commercial environments, whether in consulting, start-ups, or previous entrepreneurial ventures.
- Language: Fluency in English and at least one Southeast Asian language.
About FoodLabs
We founded FoodLabs with the commitment to revolutionize the food system and improve both planetary and human health. We envision a future in which the balance between humanity and Earth is restored and maintained sustainably. Our mission goes beyond traditional business limits, pushing into an area where each venture is a stepping stone toward a more resilient planet. We are driven by the pressing need to cultivate a global ecosystem of sustainable food, agriculture, and holistic well-being.
FoodLabs is a venture capital investor and venture studio, based in Berlin with a focus on FoodTech, AgTech, Health, and Sustainability. We back mission-driven founders who are solving the most pressing problems along the entire value chain of the food industry. And we strongly believe that science has a key role to play here. Over the last few years, we’ve been building groundbreaking ventures with scientists and founders, e.g. Formo, Klim, Torg, and InPlanet.
Location: On-site