Invest in Vegan Launch

PROBLEM

Most of today’s 4 million+ vegan investors would love to invest in vegan startups, but they can’t because nearly all vegan startups are privately-held companies.

Until now, individual investing in privately-held vegan startups has been mainly limited to the top 1% of society, those with $10 million or more in their investment portfolios who can safely participate in Angel and VC-style investment approaches.

The chart below shows that restricting early-stage investing to just the top 1% of people is preventing billions, and even trillions of dollars from being invested in the kinds of businesses that can truly transform the world economy:

Please read the "Methodology" section at the end of this page to learn how we estimated the overall size of the healthy, green, and vegan investor market.

Experienced Angel and Venture Capital investors only fund startups where one of the following liquidity events are likely:

• Sale to a large publicly-traded company with deep pockets
• A $1B+ Initial Public Offer to become a unicorn publicly-traded company
  

Few vegan startups meet these criteria due to value propositions that are profoundly incompatible with acquisitions by animal-exploiting corporations, or growth curves that won’t likely lead to the unicorn-level IPO’s demanded by VC-style investors.

As a result, over 2000 vegan startups today are literally starving for capital, despite over $3 trillion of investment capital held by individual vegan investors. This unresolved capital bottleneck facing the vast majority of vegan businesses is devastating for the vegan movement and the fate of animals, people, and the planet.

To overcome this huge funding bottleneck, the Grassroots Vegan Fund aims to bridge the gap between millions of ethical investors worldwide and the unique financing needs of today’s vegan business founders.

The Grassroots Vegan Fund is Different!

The Grassroots Vegan Fund is completely different from VC funds and vegan ETF’s (exchange-traded funds). Here are some of the differences:

THE GRASSROOTS VEGAN FUND IS DIFFERENT FROM VC FUNDS

VC funds are not liquid investment funds. To provide liquidity to their investors, they must force their portfolio companies to merge with giant conglomerates or IPO. This approach might work for Silicon Valley, but it has been a disaster for emerging ethical economies like ecology, organic food, and now, the vegan movement.

What’s more, VC funds are limited to only 100 all-accredited investors. This restricts participation to only stodgy retirement funds and ultra-wealthy individuals. Not exactly a recipe for meaningful ethical economic transformation.

In contrast to VC funds, the Grassroots Vegan Fund will be able to invest in all types of private companies and hold them inside the fund indefinitely. Liquidity will be provided via publicly-trading stock on the NASDAQ. There is no limit to the number of investors or the amount of capital that we can have under management.

This modern financial design allows for full participation by vegan activists as investors, and allows the companies held in the fund to grow at the pace that is right for them without ever having to sacrifice ethics to provide liquidity for investors.

THE GRASSROOTS VEGAN FUND IS DIFFERENT FROM VEGAN-LED EXCHANGE-TRADED FUNDS

Since 2019, vegan financial leaders have launched two ETF’s to create filtered baskets of publicly-held stocks that reflect the goals of the funds’ founders. Like any publicly-traded investment, purchases of shares in these ETF’s do not provide new capital for growth of any companies in their portfolios.

As far as we know, none of the companies held by these ETF’s are led by vegan founders or CEO’s, and none are promoting vegan principles, for example, by lobbying governments to end subsidies to animal-exploiting industries or prohibiting the use of their company funds to purchase animal products for cafeterias, etc.

This is not to say that these ETF’s are without merit for vegan investors. But collections of publicly-traded stocks can only do so much to advance the vegan economy that today overwhelmingly consists of privately-held, vegan-led companies.

In contrast to today's vegan-led ETF’s, the Grassroots Vegan Fund will allow the general public to invest via the NASDAQ in a growing collection of privately-held, vegan-led companies that are strategically designed to increase adoption of a plant-based lifestyle by people around the globe. 

Our marketing budget will serve double duty as a broad-based campaign to expand the global vegan movement while promoting the unique value propositions of the companies in our portfolio.

By funding vegan companies who market the vegan paradigm to the general public while marketing the Grassroots Vegan Fund far and wide, Vegan Launch is creating a business flywheel to help grow the vegan movement and the vegan economy much faster than is possible via VC funds and ETF's alone.

SERVING VAST UNMET NEEDS

The chart below shows $15 trillion of vegan investment opportunities that are actionable today, but require organizing large amounts of capital. The vast majority of these opportunities are far outside of the scope and scale of today’s vegan investing clubs, deal shopping platforms, and VC funds.

Please read the "Methodology" section at the end of this page to learn how we estimated the overall size of global vegan investment opportunities.

New financial strategies like the Grassroots Vegan Fund are urgently needed to finance the trillions of dollars of opportunities available in plant-based healthcare, retrofitting the food service industry, and much more.

With Vegan Launch’s modern financial and social organizing approach, these opportunities can produce generous investment returns without ever compromising vegan ethics to provide investors with liquidity.

Today, most vegan investing is focused on consumer packaged goods that provide plant-based analogs for animal foods. We feel it is time to rapidly expand vegan investing to directly solve large-scale challenges such as ocean and forest ecosystem obliteration for which animal consumption is a primary cause. 

Via our cutting-edge financial organizing approaches, Vegan Launch will be able to finance a wide range of projects from very small to very large that are typically not a good fit for Angel and Venture Capital style investing. 

HOW DOES THE GRASSROOTS VEGAN FUND WORK?

Vegan Launch is creating a truly new approach to social organizing. Instead of relying solely on volunteerism, charities, and political activism, we are organizing all investors (not just accredited) and all vegan business founders to directly build the future we want for animals, people, and the planet. 

• Vegan Launch prepares startups with world-class capital and business mentoring, does the heavy lifting required to raise early capital, and provides ongoing oversight after initial funding has been secured.
• Once companies are ready, they can receive additional capital and offer ethical liquidity to their shareholders via the Grassroots Vegan Fund, a Closed End Mutual Fund (CEMF) that will trade on the NASDAQ. 

CEMFs are not new, but few investors have heard about them. They allow the general public to invest in collections of privately-held companies. This is safer for both the companies and the investors. A CEMF is the ideal financial platform for scaling vegan ethical investing and bringing the vegan movement to the general public.  

We believe it is crucial for animals, people, and the planet that everyone who today wishes to "vote with their dollars" via the purchase of consumer products can also "vote with their investment dollars" for companies they can love via the purchase of public investment products. 

The Grassroots Vegan Fund will be able to raise capital from the general public, invest this capital into privately-held vegan companies, and provide seamless liquidity options for all investors and companies. Seamless liquidity allows us to reduce investor risk, improve business outcomes, and help assure continued growth of the vegan movement as it matures into the vegan economy.

FINANCIAL PROJECTIONS

Investors in this offer will  own a percentage of Vegan Launch which aims to become a Fund Management Company. 

Fund Management Companies make money in a number of ways. One of the main ways is charging management fees on Assets Under Supervision (AUS). Management fees for larger pools of capital typically are in the range of 2% AUS. 

For each $100 million the Grassroots Vegan Fund has under management, Vegan Launch will earn $2 million in management fees. At $1 billion under supervision, Vegan Launch will earn $20 million annually in management fees. 

IMPORTANT DETAILS

PURPOSE

The purpose of this offer is to help raise the $5 million Launch Budget necessary to legally structure and raise the overall $100 million Grassroots Vegan Fund. Investors in this offer will become part owners of Vegan Launch, the Fund Management Company. 

USE OF FUNDS

None of the $5 million Launch Budget will be used to cover Vegan Launch’s current operating expenses. 100% will be used to establish and raise the Grassroots Vegan Fund.

REVENUE MODEL

The Grassroots Vegan Fund plans to charge retail investors a 2% annual management fee. This translates to $2 million in revenue for each $100 million under management, and $20 million in revenue for each $1 billion under management. 

LIQUIDITY FOR INVESTORS IN THIS OFFER

We plan to provide liquidity to investors in this offer via trading shares of the Grassroots Vegan Fund at its IPO, and plan to provide those shares to investors in this offer at a beneficial discount to the investors in the overall Fund.

OTHER IMPORTANT DETAILS AND RISKS

We anticipate spending $2.5 million of the $5 million Launch Budget on attorneys expert in Closed End Mutual Funds. Many of the Important Details in this section may change based on guidance from the attorneys we plan to retain with the Launch Budget funds.

We anticipate spending the remaining $2.5 million of the $5 million Launch budget to raise the actual Grassroots Vegan Fund. Success in that effort is not assured. 

100% of your investment in this offer is subject to loss. Vegan Launch believes this risk is worth it to have this unique opportunity to transform the entire ethical investment field.

PRIOR CAPITALIZATION

$250,000 Seed Round
$30,000 SBA EIDL and PPP loans

THANK YOU!!

If you read this far, thank you! As you can see, we are passionate about growing the vegan economy by providing financial training and creating highly-scalable public investment products for grassroots investors of every capacity. 

We very much hope you’ll join us on this journey. Together we can make a tremendous difference! Please feel free to share this funding campaign far and wide!

Mark Winstein, Founder & CEO

CHART METHODOLOGY

Market estimates are very important in deciding whether any company is worth starting or investing in. Here is how we used freely available data and logic to construct the numeric market information we used to prepare the estimates noted in the charts included in this investment offer and to rationalize pursuing the creation of the Grassroots Vegan Fund. 

Healthy, Green, and Vegan Investor Market

Google advises us that the global market capitalization of publicly traded stocks is about $100 trillion. While this number may fluctuate day to day, we feel comfortable that the $100 trillion figure is a conservative starting point for estimating our investor market. 

What's more, publicly-traded stocks represent only one asset class. Other substantial investor asset classes include privately-held equities and debt notes, real estate, currency, precious metals, crypto currencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), collectible cars, artwork, and more.

To estimate our overall market niche of $30 trillion in public stock held by ethically-minded investors, we refer back to the carefully studied Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) demographic which describes a type of consumer that actively seeks out healthier and more sustainable lifestyle, product, and service options, and who consider these values very important when making purchasing decisions.

Google tells us that the LOHAS market is 23% of the USA population, 29% of the Japanese population and 33% of the New Zealand population, with other westernized countries following this trend.

Our $30 trillion number becomes even more conservative when we consider that stockholders overall represent only about the top 56% of households in western countries. If LOHAS consumers are 23% of the overall USA population, as top-tier consumers, we would expect them to comfortably represent as much as 40% or more of public stockholders.

By similar logic, 2019 demographics charts show that vegans are roughly 3% of the overall US population. Most other western countries have similar population percentages self-identifying as vegan. 

Because vegans are a sub-niche of the LOHAS demographic, we project that they will also be overrepresented in the public stock investor market, giving a conservative estimate of $3 trillion in public stock assets held by vegans who place a premium on animal rights. People who self-identify as plant-based or vegetarian, but who may not self-identify as vegan increase our most accessible investor niche even more.

Last, we divide the vegan investor market by wealth. There is a substantial amount of data available on this. Google tells us that to be in the top 1% of global wealth today, an individual would need to control $11 million in assets.

While the top 1% of individuals control an greatly overweighted percentage of global wealth, when we zoom in first on westernized economies, and then on the top half of those economies that hold public stock wealth, we get a much more nuanced estimate of wealth held by lower wealth tiers who until now have been almost completely excluded from making meaningful investment decisions that can affect the global economy by outdated private investment regulations and practices dating back to the 1930's.

Our research suggests that trillions of dollars of investment capital is today tied up in mostly status quo investments. We believe large portions of this latent capital could very likely be reinvested in vegan ethical ventures that expand animal rights, human health, and protect our life-supporting ecosystems.

Vegan Investment Opportunities

In 2020, we created a 120-page comprehensive internal report with the goal of identifying every possible way animals are exploited for commerce. Most of the noted figures in this report were readily found by Googling "global spending" or "global market" along with the key industry or niche term. 

Many vegan angel investors and VC funds are attracted to creating plant-based food analogs for animal products. Our research and charts suggest nearly endless opportunities for vegan value investing in additional niches not well-served by ethically-minded angel and VC investors. 

For example, plant-based lifestyle medicine is a rapidly growing field. What is the opportunity? Dr. Dean Ornish, one of the leading proponents for this field has stated that 86% of overall health-care costs go to treat chronic illnesses that can be largely prevented and/or reversed via diet and lifestyle changes.  

A quick lookup on Google tells us that 2018 global health care was $8.3 trillion. 86% of that is $7.1 trillion. Estimating a conservative 5% increase attributable to industry growth and inflation between 2018 and 2021 puts the estimate of chronic illness related costs at $7.5 trillion as shown in the chart. 

We believe a well-financed plant-based lifestyle medicine industry could use its marketing power to educate large numbers of people about the true cause of their illnesses, driving down global demand for animal-based foods and saving trillions of dollars in health-care costs.  

Food Service is another extremely large area for vegan-motivated investing. The vegan movement is known for pleading with restaurant chains to include vegan options. From our perspective, if we plan to educate the world about lifestyle medicine to shift values at a cultural scale, it would make strategic investment sense to purchase large numbers of restaurants and veganize them to meet and further drive this future demand for healthy prepared meals.

We use a simple approach to calculating a conservative market capitalization for each industry in the chart. We feel it is safe to assume that most companies of any scale in these industries will operate at a roughly 10% annual profit. If the equities market conservatively values their stock prices at 10x profits, that means that the market capitalization for these industries is the same as their annual sales! In this way, we can quickly determine how much capital it might take to directly purchase businesses in the sectors we wish to transform. 

While the vegan founders we've worked with since 2018 have developed fascinating strategies for transforming legacy industries without the need to purchase individual animal-exploiting companies outright, it is useful to consider the market capitalization of today's animal-exploitation industries assess the scale of capital mobilization needed to transform the global economy, and not leave any opportunity off the table. 

There are so many investment opportunities of all shapes and sizes in the vegan economy today. Vegan Launch's Grassroots Vegan Fund can play a leading roll by helping public investors support the vegan business movement at a whole new scale.