Lessons from the Collaborative Financing Masterminds at RFSI Europe
The funding gap for early-stage regenerative food ventures is well documented. What gets less attention is why it persists — and what it actually takes to close it.
At RFSI Europe 2026, funders, founders, and farmers explored together how finance for regenerative food ventures can work better. The core insight was that the challenge is not only a lack of capital, but a structural mismatch between how regenerative businesses operate and how traditional finance is organized.
To address this, the organizers – with the leadership of Maarten Derksen of Stichting DOEN and Bart van der Zande of Fresh Ventures Studio – introduced a Collaborative Financing Mastermind format: no pitching, no asking for money, but collaborative problem-solving between funders, founders, and field builders around real venture challenges. The result was more honest conversations, stronger relationships, and practical solutions that in some cases moved further in 45 minutes than months of traditional fundraising conversations.
Four ventures were central to the discussions:
- Opterra, developing a working capital fund for specialty coffee importers;
- Regenrate, building camelina cover crop value chains linked to sustainable aviation fuel and regenerative farming;
- Azienda Agricola San Bonifacio, an agroforestry farm in Italy exploring mission-aligned ownership and financing structures;
- Cultivae, a farmer-led regenerative certification scheme in Belgium.
Each sat at mixed tables – including funders, field builders and other founders – discussing a fundraising challenge for 45 minutes. Across these cases, several recurring themes emerged:
- ventures are often misunderstood because the wrong type of capital is applied to the wrong challenge;
- rigid investment criteria can unintentionally block regenerative solutions;
- alternative ownership and governance models require deeper understanding and trust;
- and most importantly, relationships and openness are essential to navigating complexity together.
The article below argues that regenerative finance cannot be built through abstract theory or standard pitch dynamics alone. Because these ventures are helping create entirely new systems, funders and investees need the ability to carry complexity together through long-term, trust-based relationships.
The main conclusion: Regenerative finance is learned by working together on real cases — not by discussing it in abstraction.
Read on to dive deeper into this process and the outcomes.
Why the Gap Persists
The structural mismatch between early-stage regenerative ventures and available capital is not a mystery. It is the product of how both sides of the table are organized.
For funders, the economics of a standard 2-3% management fee make small, complex, early-stage deals difficult to justify. Evaluating a EUR 200,000 ticket in a novel venture requires nearly as much time as evaluating a EUR 2 million one. The result is a gravitational pull toward later-stage, larger, cleaner deals – even among funders who are genuinely committed to the early stage. Impact funds, family offices, and foundations that have built comparable cost structures face the same pull.
For founders, the mirror problem is just as real. Raising EUR 50,000 takes roughly as much time and energy as raising EUR 500,000. Due diligence, legal work, funder education, relationship-building: none of it scales with ticket size. For regenerative food ventures – which tend to operate in underdeveloped value chains, with novel ownership structures and business models that require real explanation – the cost is higher still. Much of the intellectual pioneering required to operate inside the current system while building a different one falls to founders by default, consuming exactly the capacity they need for the venture itself.
Add in the mismatch between regenerative business models — which often don’t follow high-risk, high-return exponential growth curves, as well as impact funders’ reporting and measurement requirements, and evolving and different ownership structures for which investors have had limited exposure — and the structural problem compounds.
A Format Built for the Work
The Mastermind at RFSI Europe featured four ventures presenting challenges to four mixed tables of funders, founders, and field builders. The process ran on four rules: no pitching, no asking for money, the venture’s fundraising challenge — not the investment opportunity — sits at the center, and funders, founders, and field builders share the same table.
These rules are not stylistic preferences. They change what becomes visible. When founders are not in performance mode, they can describe what they are actually stuck on. When funders are not in evaluation mode, they can think alongside the challenge rather than assess it from the outside. Each session moved through three structured phases: clarifying questions, ideas and solutions, and network navigation — forty-five minutes total, with written notes captured from everyone at the table.
The assumption is straightforward: a more open conversation surfaces better insights. Founders learn the funder’s real constraints. Funders learn what the project or venture actually needs – and often find that colleagues at the table have already navigated a piece of the puzzle. The relationship that begins here starts on different footing than the typical pitch dynamic.
Four Ventures, Four Conversations
What emerged from the collaborative conversations was not only substantive insight for the founders, but also deeper relationships with funders and partners at the tables, with several continuing afterward in advisory and financing conversations. The arcs below show how.
Opterra
Nick Shallow, founder of Opterra, presented an impact working capital fund for Dutch specialty coffee importers — lending against container shipments to bridge the gap between prepayment to origin processors and payment from roasters. The table’s initial instinct was to treat it like an equity proposition: questions about IRR, scale, and differentiation. The conversation turned when someone named what was actually on the table. This is private debt, asset-backed, short-duration — a different asset class with a different investor profile.
From there, the right audience came into focus: family offices, faith-adjacent capital, trade finance desks. SPV structuring with off takers in the chain emerged as a concrete de-risking path. Comparable models — Gårdskapital, CSAF members, Pure Africa Foundation — were named.
Regenrate
Alice Henry presented a venture building camelina cover crop value chains, with offtake in sustainable aviation fuel and alternative protein. Three learnings from this table are worth carrying forward.
The first is about funder thesis as blind spot. Several regenerative impact funds exclude energy investments on principle — a reasonable response to fossil fuels, but a blunt instrument when applied categorically. Regenrate falls inside that exclusion by category, even though the farmland at the heart of the model is exactly what regenerative funders exist to protect. Camelina in rotation uses the off-season slot to keep prime land in regenerative production while integrating energy-market demand in a way that serves the mission. A hard no on energy, held without nuance, closes that conversation before it starts.
The second is about separating the capital ask. Presented together, Regenrate looks like a complex, hard-to-categorize proposition: venture equity for genetics and technology development and seasonal working capital to pre-finance seed procurement. Pulled apart, it becomes two distinct instruments — long-duration, mission-aligned equity on one side, and a short-term, asset-backed facility suited to trade finance or an SPV with off taker involvement on the other. Blended capital needs presented together read as complexity and lose the conversation. Separated cleanly, they become two fundable propositions.
The third is about alternative ownership structures and the learning they require on both sides. The table initially suggested dropping steward ownership to widen the investor pool. By the end of forty-five minutes — after Alice explained the specific exit risk of an oil and gas acquirer, and the group worked through why a return cap is a principled structural choice rather than a red flag — the conversation had shifted. Not whether to engage with steward ownership, but how.
Azienda Agricola San Bonifacio
Federico Bonofacia presented a 30-hectare agroforestry farm in Verona seeking capital to buy out family members while preserving mission governance and positioning the farm as a regional model for land transition. This is a case that sits at the edge of where standard farmer financing reaches. Most farmers in transition work within familiar loan structures against land as collateral. Federico’s situation – intergenerational family dynamics, a buyout requiring mission alignment, a lighthouse ambition that depends on the farm being visibly attractive to replicate – pushes well beyond what those instruments are designed to carry.
The table pushed hard on economics: at roughly EUR 1,000 per hectare in annual revenue, the farm is not yet financially compelling enough to attract investors, mission-aligned partners, or neighboring farmers. A lighthouse that loses money lights nothing. High-margin perennials – almonds, paulownia, apple orchards – and premium vegetables were raised as concrete paths to change that. In terms of organization, giving key staff ownership stakes in specific operations – a chicken coop, a specialty crop – with profit sharing and growth potential surfaced as a way to attract mission-aligned partners rather than employees. On governance, the family buyout needed to be structured explicitly, with mission-alignment provisions for remaining family members and steward-ownership elements to prevent any future sale that would undermine the model.
Cultivae
The Cultivae team presented a farmer-led regenerative certification scheme in Belgium — built on a twenty-minute self-reported farmer form, with around 150 certified farmers and ambition to scale. The table arrived quickly at what looked like a binary: a nonprofit structure carries credibility with farmers, but a commercial structure is needed to attract growth capital. Choose one, lose the other.
What surfaced over the discussion was that the binary is false — but only if the underlying MRV methodology is credible enough to carry both. Third-party verification, satellite and GIS data, and alignment with existing certifications rather than competition with them all emerged as necessary steps. The group also reframed the growth strategy: off taker pull, not farmer push, is probably the real lever. Buyers committed to sustainability reporting will pull farmers along if the contracts are attractive.
Four Patterns Across All the Tables
Each venture represented different geographies, sectors, and capital needs, yet four recurring patterns ran beneath every conversation.
Capital-type confusion appeared in every session. Working capital was being approached as equity. Grant-appropriate activities were being squeezed into investment theses. Blended asks were read as complexity rather than as distinct, clean instruments. Naming the capital type clearly was consistently one of the most productive moments of each session. It also raised a harder question: As the ecosystem starts to explore innovative funding structures, how can we ensure that the complexity of managing and orchestrating these new models is done collaboratively?
Ownership and governance as structural complexity was the second pattern. Steward ownership, family land dynamics, nonprofit-commercial hybrids, SPV design: each created friction not because the structures were wrong, but because funders lacked the time and frameworks to evaluate them quickly. Complexity that makes sense in context looks like a red flag from the outside — unless someone at the table has the experience to move past the binary and into how.
The dual mandate tension was the third. Every venture at the tables was simultaneously building a commercially viable business inside the current food system and working to enable a different one to emerge. That is not a communications problem. It is a real structural complexity that cannot be simplified away. It requires partners who can hold that tension alongside the founder — not evaluate it from the outside.
Trust as the unlock was the fourth, and most important, pattern. The most useful insights consistently surfaced not from the structured agenda but from moments of genuine openness — a founder naming what they were actually afraid of, a funder sharing a constraint they would normally keep internal, a participant connecting a challenge to something they had seen fail elsewhere. The format created the conditions for this. The relationship did the work.
The Simplest Lesson
The deepest lesson from the four sessions is the most straightforward: we learn what regenerative finance actually needs by working on specific cases together — not by exploring the question in the abstract. Every pattern in this piece — capital-type confusion, governance complexity, dual mandate tension, trust as unlock — came from sitting with real ventures facing real constraints.
Abstract conversations about regenerative finance will not close the gap. Working on real deals, together, in rooms where complexity can be carried, will.
Where to Next? Three Directions Worth Pursuing
No single intervention closes the structural gap between funder and investee. But three directions emerged from the Collaborative Financing Mastermind at RFSI Europe 2026 as genuinely useful — and they reinforce each other.
Build infrastructure that closes the gap .
We need more systemic infrastructure designed to address the gaps described here – services that support ecosystem building, founder training, early de-risking, and sustained funder relationship-building. This infrastructure would serve to do the orchestration work between various funders (and types of capital) and the founders and farmers seeking to put that capital to work. In this way, patient philanthropic capital can be effectively blended with impact-first investment capital to cover the gap neither can reach alone. Fresh Ventures Studio is developing a structure that blends a grant-funded nonprofit platform with an early-stage funding vehicle and will be able to share more in coming months.
Funders: examine your own enabling conditions.
Does your organization allocate resources to the relational work that precedes a good early-stage deal? Does your investment thesis contain blind spots that work against the outcomes you are trying to achieve — a categorical exclusion that inadvertently closes the door on exactly the model you exist to support? Are you funding the enabling conditions — ecosystem builders, infrastructure players, shared learning — alongside the ventures themselves? As Maarten Derksen put it directly at RFSI Europe: we invest toward a regenerative food system, and we look for regenerative businesses. But are we, as funders, regenerative ourselves?
Use the format — or build a better one.
The Mastermind is cheap to run, repeatable, and produces a quality of conversation that conventional pitch processes systematically strip out. The facilitation guide, forms, and session report templates are available from Fresh Ventures Studio. Use them. Adapt them. Share what you learn.
Bart van der Zande, Fresh Ventures Studio — a talent and venture building studio working to transform the food system.
Maarten Derksen, Stichting DOEN — supports pioneers building a greener, more social, and creative world.