
Kicking off 2025, The March Group (“TMG”) Founding Partner Dr. Harold Schmitz sits down with Bloomberg’s David Westin on Wall Street Week. In its flagship news program, Bloomberg features TMG alongside its portfolio company Rivalz and its UC Davis-based Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) partner PIPA to illustrate the power and timeliness of TMG’s unique investment thesis. This recognition is noteworthy given Bloomberg’s stated purpose “to be the definitive ‘chronicle of capitalism’ capturing everything that matters in global business and finance” whilst leveraging its Wall Street Week platform to “tell the stories of capitalism from around the world”.
In the episode “Making Food with AI”, Bloomberg examines TMG’s breakthrough thesis stemming from the intersection of AI and GLP-1 medications, and the resulting opportunity to radically improve the multi-trillion USD food industry. Brought to life by Rivalz, the TMG portfolio company’s success to date represents a once-in-a-generation wealth creation opportunity to invest into building a new class of startup food companies.
This episode highlights the innovative model TMG is bringing to the market by placing AI at the center of food company business models, thus enabling investors to predictably realize exponential VC returns. The agility of well-structured startups with AI at the center of their business model, such as Rivalz, is a game-changing competitive advantage in driving transformative “faster/better/cheaper” benefits regarding innovation and operations compared to established incumbents. This model equally applies to other types of exponential technologies in TMG’s company portfolio, including the biotechnology platforms within Digestiva, EvodiaBio, Meati, Number8Bio and VinZymes.
David Westin directly references the failure of many alternative protein startups during the past decade. TMG believes these failures represent a “red herring” in context of the massive opportunity being driven by consumer food and health megatrends. This opportunity potential is further amplified by the world’s continuing population growth in combination with lucrative and growing TAMs in key categories ripe for disruption, such as the snack foods TAM noted by Westin. The timing is ideal for smart money to learn from those failures and participate in the creation of a new high-returns technology investment category — something Westin and TMG Founding Partner Dr. Schmitz discussed at length off-camera.
We are honored by Bloomberg recognizing TMG as a VC capable of identifying and structuring these types of breakthrough startups at this pivotal moment in the history of the food industry. TMG has achieved this leadership position because of its unique combination of domain expertise, successful track records of its Partners and their commitment to exponential technologies such as “AI at the Center”, and long-term partnerships with world-class innovation ecosystems at UC Davis, the University of California System, the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s BioInnovation Institute, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
As always, we invite you to join us on the journey to accelerate the urgently needed change in the food industry required to improve human and planetary health.