How Foodhack became the trusted gateway for investors backing European and American startups.
Context
Foodhack had built a strong editorial brand around European startup ecosystems and earned the trust of an engaged investor community.
With market validation in place and a first round of funding closed, the team was ready to move beyond media into a real investment platform — a place where investors could discover deals through the editorial lens, back the startups they read about, and track their positions afterward.
The challenge: build that product without diluting what made Foodhack work in the first place — editorial trust and a clear point of view on early-stage Europe and the US.
01
Editorial as the spine of the product
Every investment opportunity is anchored to its original editorial — the article, the founder interview, the conference recording. The product reads like the magazine, not like a marketplace. Investors arrive with context, not a cold deck.
02
Investor-first information architecture
We mapped the IA to the investor's actual journey: discover, evaluate, invest, track. Each section corresponds to a real moment, not a feature category — so the platform stays legible as it grows.
03
A tracker built for early-stage reality
Existing trackers mimic public-market dashboards — daily price ticks, intra-day charts. Useless at seed. We designed around what matters early: founder updates, milestones, follow-on rounds, exit signals.
16 weeks. Measurable shift.
Investor platform
v1 shipped
Investor journey
Mapped end-to-end
Editorial × product
Unified workflow
What I'd do differently
The biggest unlock was treating the editorial team as design partners, not stakeholders. The product reads the way the magazine sounds — that consistency is Foodhack's edge, and it's what we protected at every decision.
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