Episode 119: Nous: Lorenzo Pessini on Landing dsm-firmenich as a Strategic Lead, the Clinical Study That Closed the Round, and Why He Chose B2B Over Building a Brand
In this episode, I speak with Lorenzo Pessini, the 27-year-old CEO & Founder of NOUS, an Italian food-tech company building the functional ingredients of the future for food, beverage, and nutraceuticals. NOUS just closed a €2.315M seed round led by dsm-firmenich Ventures (co-led by Eatable Adventures and CDP Venture Capital) — and the story of how it came together is a masterclass in working with a strategic. dsm-firmenich's scouting team found Nous roughly 18 months earlier, when the company was a pre-seed unknown whose only real digital footprint was a press release from its FoodSeed pre-seed. Lorenzo walks us through the pivot that reframed their flagship ingredient, Koncentra, from a "caffeine alternative" (a losing race against cheap synthetic caffeine) into a botanical brain-wellbeing ingredient for energy, focus, and mood — and how a jointly-run clinical study with dsm-firmenich became the single thing that closed the round. We go deep on the mechanics most founders never hear: what clinical studies actually cost (€70K to €180K+), how crossover designs cut the bill, why placebo is the golden standard, and the 9–15 month timeline from protocol to publication. Then Lorenzo makes a candid case for B2B over B2C, explains a deliberately counterintuitive IP strategy (patent the product, keep the process a trade secret), and shares grounded wisdom on valuation, transparency, and the patience a corporate partnership demands.
🎧 Listen to the full episode to hear why a press release should spotlight the company, not the founder; how to get a strategic to co-invest in the very clinical study that de-risks their own deal; the crossover-study trick that turns 20 participants into a 60-person comparison; why Lorenzo would rather be "in the shadows" doing R&D than exposed to consumer pressure; and his approach to benchmarking valuation by calling other founders — with a crucial caveat about comparing apples to apples.
Key Facts: Nous
- Lorenzo Pessini (CEO & Founder): https://www.linkedin.com/in/pessinilorenzo
- Headquarters: Italy
- What They Do: A B2B food-tech company developing science-backed functional ingredients for food, beverage, and nutraceuticals. Flagship ingredient Koncentra is a botanical phytocomplex (a combination of molecules from four raw materials) positioned for brain wellbeing — supporting energy levels, cognition/alertness, and mood — via a proprietary extraction and granulation process.
- Funding: €2.315M seed round led by dsm-firmenich Ventures, co-led by Eatable Adventures (via Accelera Ventures) and CDP Venture Capital.
Blurb
NOUS is built on a disciplined idea: that the winning functional ingredients of the future won't be the loudest consumer brands, but the scientifically-validated building blocks inside them. Its flagship, Koncentra, is a botanical phytocomplex engineered through a proprietary extraction and granulation process to support energy, focus, and mood — a "brain-wellbeing" ingredient designed to sit inside the products of the world's biggest beverage and supplement companies rather than compete with them on a shelf. When a race against cheap synthetic caffeine proved a dead end, Nous repositioned the ingredient around what a third party could actually prove it did, and let the science lead.
