Time-travelling Milkman: Dimitris Karefyllakis shares how to get funded in 2025Investment 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 55: Time-travelling Milkman: Dimitris Karefyllakis shares how to get funded in 2025In this episode, I sit down with Dimitris Karefyllakis, co-founder & CEO of Time-Travelling Milkman, a Dutch startup redefining plant-based creaminess. The company recently closed a €2M pre-Series A round led by Puratos, a global bakery and chocolate giant that first became a strategic partner after years of R&D collaboration. Dimitris walks us through how they turned a pilot relationship into an investment, set firm fundraising timelines to close in just eight months, and scaled production to 1,000 tons of their patented oleo cream — a sunflower-seed-based fat system replacing dairy and palm oil in foods like cream cheese and chocolate fillings. With over €5M total raised (including €1M in grants) and partnerships spanning Europe and Greece, Time-Travelling Milkman is proving that capital efficiency, technical grit, and patient partnerships can outpace the hype.🎧 Listen to the full episode to hear how Dimitris raised from corporates, scaled sustainably, and built “the future of creaminess” — one sunflower seed at a time.Key Facts Time-travelling Milkman:Goal: To make plant-based dairy truly indulgent, without compromise.Recently closed a €2M pre-Series A round led by PuratosAlex’s Top Findings:Strategic Lead Came from Years of Technical Co-Development. The lead investor is a confectionery/bakery/chocolate corporation that had already been testing OleoCream for years. Familiarity with the tech and use cases made the investment discussion straightforward. ”Our lead investor is a corporation from Belgium, and they work in confectionery baking and chocolate. We had already been testing with them for a couple of years, and we saw a good strategic fit as well. They saw it from their side, and it was an easier discussion because they know what we do, they know what we want to do in the future, and they were quite right to chip in and lead the round.”De-Risking Corporate Concentration: Two Strategics on the Cap Table. Bringing two strategic balances influences and broadens commercial pathways; it also reassures future investors that the company isn’t beholden to a single corporation. “ Received this advice early on is to try to have at least two corporates on the cap table. Because then, both of them will be pulling, let's say, from different directions. But then the average will still be good for the company. That's valuable. So you don't get, let's say, manhandled by only one partner. So if you get the valuable partners that really know what you do, and they can help you.”Valuation Discipline Paid Off. Time-travelling Milkman avoided the “Gatsby years” hype. Lower prior valuations prevented painful flats/downs and enabled a fair step-up grounded in real progress and investor alignment. “ We never got the opportunity to have exaggerated valuations… now it went higher… a fair deal that was balanced from both sides.”

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