Collateral Good's Mariana Gonzalez on

Mariana Gonzalez, Co-Founder & Partner at the Zurich-based venture fund Collateral Good, says a "flat round is the new up round" in the current food-tech reset. Gonzalez shared this view on the Investment Climate podcast hosted by Alex Shandrovsky, detailing her fund's strategy of investing through corporate partnerships.

Collateral Good manages €100M across three thematic funds focused on food innovation, packaging innovation, and textile innovation. It has 24 portfolio companies. A key differentiator is its backing from major corporate limited partners: Grupo Bimbo, the world's largest bread manufacturer, anchors the food fund, while Hugo Boss supports the textile fund.

Corporate-Backed Venture Edge

This corporate linkage provides direct access to industry pain points and the R&D decision-makers who adopt new technologies. Gonzalez, a Mexican industrial engineer with a background in operations and logistics at Costco, brings a retail and supply-chain perspective to venture investing. She argues that this closeness to actual buyers is rarer and more valuable than capital alone in the slow-moving consumer goods sector.

The fund's approach combines venture conviction with a realistic understanding of how slowly consumers and supply chains change. Gonzalez notes that food-tech development timelines often run five or more years longer than initial projections in pitch decks.

Navigating the Investment Reset

Gonzalez characterizes the current period as an investor's market, a shift from the founder's market of 2021 and 2022. In this reset, Collateral Good's strategy is evolving to target more market-proven companies and "special situations" created by recent valuation corrections. The firm acts as a lead, co-lead, or follow-on investor depending on what best serves the company.

She offers practical fundraising advice for founders, emphasizing transparency and cap-table alignment, which she describes as needing "a village." Gonzalez also details how she approaches bridge rounds from the investor's side, advocating for honest conversations from a position of strength.

Founder Traits for Survival

Gonzalez highlights two critical founder traits she believes separate the survivors in the challenging food-tech space: brutal honesty and the willingness to ask for help early. She also discusses her criteria for backing "moonshot" projects, indicating a selective approach based on realistic pathways to market.

The podcast reveals that corporate venture capital and corporate limited partners are becoming far more strategic in their investments. Despite this trend, Gonzalez asserts that independent funds like Collateral Good remain necessary as intermediaries and specialists. The fund's select food portfolio includes companies like The EVERY Company, LiveKindly, Heartbest (a plant-based dairy firm in Mexico), and Bramble (a US pet food company).

Collateral Good has been operating as a climate-first impact venture fund since 2018. Its structure, built on corporate partnerships, is presented as difficult for other investors to replicate. The full conversation, described as a masterclass, is available through the podcast's syndication partners, Foodtech Weekly and Vegconomist.