Nicole Astra:
Along with the rest of the world. Next Gen's TiNDLE has our attention. Andre Menezes, TiNDLE's co-founder and CEO recently sat down with us to discuss the company, preparing to launch in the US. Now, when a company makes this big of a splash in the industry, everyone wants to know how they did it. Andre Menezes tackles your questions in this informative Q and A series. Thank you so much for joining us.

Andre Menezes:
Thank you, Nicole. Pleasure to be here.

Nicole Astra:
I did give you a little bit of warning that we reached out to our current contributors that have been on the show and we wanted them to bring their questions to you. I can only imagine everyone wants your attention that being this successful so quickly. So we appreciate your time and I want to dig right in. So Jazza Lupini wants to start with, how did you decide on Asia as the place to launch, as to start from?

Andre Menezes:
I'll answer that, but before I would like to just share that, we do see that whatever we are doing, right, it's our duty to also share with startup communities and entrepreneurs. And we would love to, to be able to reach a stage in which we can inspire and teach and coach people that are especially working to make the planet a better place to live in, in line with our mission. So it's absolutely a pleasure to be here and more than happy to take the questions. So starting with the first one, why Asia, why did we start in Asia? If you look at Asia, it is obviously a melting pot of so many different cultures, languages, and countries and cuisines and everything, but it is where most of the meat consumption and most of the animal farming growth is coming from, population is growing, economy is growing, consumption of animal farm-based products is growing a lot.

Andre Menezes:
So it is a place that it's actually a place that you have to address the growth with a more sustainable food system very well and that's going to change the world, but not only that, in particularly why Singapore? I think that is an interesting point. And that's not looking at Singapore as an Asian hub. We're looking at Singapore as a global hub. Singapore is becoming increasingly a global food tech hub. I like to say like a Silicon Valley of food tech and that's because of different reasons that Singapore is developing the sector from food security perspective from sustainability. And they're putting together an incredible ecosystem that basically it makes our life as a startup very attractive.

Andre Menezes:
What do I mean by that? It means that we are in an island that's 30 to 40 kilometers, and we have access to the best R&D institutes who have access to the best venture capitalists who have access to restaurants and consumers from all around the world. And I don't think it's easy to find such an ecosystem anywhere else in the world and extremely well connected and extremely global. You have the best from the west and from the east combining to that small little island. So for us, that's the reason why I started with Asia. Yeah.

Nicole Astra:
Make sense.

Andre Menezes:
With Singapore, specifically.

Nicole Astra:
P & M foods would like to know financing options for starting in the US. Of course, everyone's looking to accelerate entry, growth, but then also to look to the future, to perhaps building, manufacturing a plant there.

Andre Menezes:
From our perspective, we started from understanding what we wanted as a business. I think this is where anyone who is looking at financing, including ourselves should probably start. And what were our objectives? How fast do we want to grow? What do we need to grow that quickly? Do we need to spend ahead of the curve or can we grow and then spend whatever is coming from organic growth and both Tim and I, we had experiences in the past with running businesses that were organic and generating profit and using the profit to grow. But we, in our case, we understood that our strategy needed capital injection to really support a global growth and a very accelerated pace.

Andre Menezes:
That's driven by the fact that we want to increase the speed of our mission. We want to build a global business and then launch, which is very different from starting something small and expanding. Therefore, we decided to take a path on financing options. You looking at, venture capitalists and investment funds and doing funding rounds. We did a seed round and then we did an extension of seed round in which we would obviously dilute a little bit of the company, welcoming partners, investors that are more than just capital. They also bring their networks. They also bring their credibility. They help us in our journey. And that's how we see financing overall.

Nicole Astra:
Thank you for joining us for part one of this series and thank you to the Next Gen team for proving that sustainability is a shared goal with room for everyone at the table. Ahead in part two, hear from Andre about what it took to create this groundbreaking product.