Ep. 310 How I Raised It with Chaz Flexman of Starday Foods (raised from Slow VC, Equal Ventures)
episode
How I Raised It - The podcast where we interview startup founders who raised capital.
40 min
1 speaker
5 chapters
transcribed 17 days ago
Transcript
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What is Starday Foods and how does it use AI to discover unmet consumer needs?
What I always tell other founders on their raising is like you just have to build a funnel. Like it's not twenty firms, it's not sixty firms, it's get a hundred, a hundred and fifty in the pipeline. Some aren't gonna take a meeting, some you might not be have the right intro to to get to them. Others, you know, it it's not gonna be a fit and there's gonna be a set of folks that are. And the more that you do, the tighter you run it, the better the outcome is gonna be.
Hi guys, welcome to the How I Raise It Podcast, the show where we get an inside look at how real entrepreneurs and VCs raise capital for their businesses. I'm your host, Nathan Beckard, and today's episode is with Chaz Flexman of Star Day Foods. Starday is a food innovation company that uses AI to identify unmet consumer needs, and then it creates food brands to meet those needs. For example, one of its popular products is an all-day chickpea protein topper. Starday recently raised an $11 million Series A led by Slow Ventures and Equal Ventures. We talk about their food development process, how they identify unmet needs and markets, how they identified VCs interested in this, hint it's not consumer package good investors, the importance of building a funnel, how to keep investors updated on your funding progress, and much more.
If you're tuning into this podcast to learn how to raise capital for your business, be sure to check out foundersuite.com if you're a startup or fundingstack.com if you're a VC or advisor. Both platforms will give you access to an awesome collection of tools for raising capital, including a massive investor database, a new get intro tool to get warm introductions to those investors, a CRM to manage your raise, a virtual data room to run due diligence, plus pitch deck hosting, investor updates, email tools, and more. Last but not least, if you enjoy this conversation and think someone else would too, please share it with them and hit that subscribe button to get all our latest episodes. Thank you.
Sit back and enjoy this chat with Chaz. Welcome to How I Raised It!
The podcast that goes behind the scenes with entrepreneurs who've raised capital. We uncover the tips, tricks, and techniques they use to get investors to write a check. Strap in and turn it off.
Hi, welcome to another episode of How I Raised It, produced by Foundersweet dot com and Funding Stack dot com. Today I have Chaz Flexman of Star Day Foods. How's your day going? Wonderful. Excited to be on with you today. Good. I think you have maybe the coolest name I've I've had, Chaz Flexman. Almost sounds like a uh a movie character or something. Um
I would be lying if I said that wasn't the that was the first time I heard that before. So
Great name. Kudos to your parents. So what is Star Day Foods?
Sure. So certainly we started with the premise of uh building the kind of the next great ethmy conglomerate or building brands, but really using software and data science uh to drive that. So trying to replicate something that you've seen in other industries like um apparel with Stitchfix and Shein, you know, they know people like white shirts and they go make it. Uh Oddity and Beauty is done something similar. And And we're doing something similar in Food and Bev where we're trying to understand where's your pent-up consumer demand, where is there uh a pent-up need that consumers have, uh, and then building products to go meet that that need. Right. And so we use a number of different software tools that we built to kind of really understand and kind of hone in on uh the what and the why behind it and and what the right product is to put on shelf to kind of satisfy those consumer needs.
So we've launched uh four. brand sedate um in most major retailers out there. And then we, you know, again have continue to kind of build out our software platform to even uh partner and help some other uh companies with their own product development because we can again see that kind of pent up consumer need and and uh you know derive that from the software side.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is Starday Foods and how does it use AI to discover unmet consumer needs?
0:00–11:38
2
How does Starday identify and validate market opportunities beyond simple trends?
11:38–21:03
3
What is the product‑development sandbox and how does it turn data insights into tasty, shelf‑ready foods?
21:03–29:54
4
How did Starday build its early brand portfolio and what were the first products launched?
29:54–38:25
5
What was the seed‑funding strategy, including the role of the entrepreneur‑in‑residence program and early investor outreach?
38:25–40:27
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from How I Raised It - The podcast where we interview startup founders who raised capital.
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