Biography

Kelsey leads capital mobilization at Food System Innovations, where she develops and implements catalytic capital strategies for family offices, foundations, and high-net-worth individuals investing at the intersection of climate, food, and biotechnology. Her work spans capital strategy, concessional finance design, and ecosystem-level coordination, identifying where targeted capital can unlock disproportionate impact in the sustainable protein sector.

Across her career, Kelsey has secured more than $20 million in public funding to advance climate and biomanufacturing solutions, including federal contracts and grants from the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and Economic Development Administration. As Senior Director of Strategy & Partnerships at Roebling (formerly Synonym Inc.), she focused on deal sourcing, due diligence, and transaction structuring during the company's earlier chapter as a biomanufacturing infrastructure developer, including a construction project for a demonstration-scale biomanufacturing facility for which she secured 70% of project CapEx through the EDA Tech Hubs program. As employee #2, she also built the company's commercial function from the ground up, generating >90% of company revenue and standing up the systems, partnerships, and team behind it.

Earlier in her career, Kelsey held strategic operations and chief of staff roles at Impossible Foods and Motif Foodworks, where she led commercialization initiatives for category-defining alternative protein platforms, from co-development deals and distribution partnerships to international expansion strategy. She was also a Research Fellow at the Good Food Institute, leading research on scaling challenges across the alternative protein value chain. She began her career as an analyst at Two Sigma's private equity and venture capital arm, where she developed the financial modeling, market analysis, and deal evaluation rigor she now applies to impact-aligned capital strategy. Kelsey is a graduate of Dartmouth College.

Across these roles, Kelsey has built a combination of deep technical fluency in fermentation and bioprocess scale-up, paired with the deal-structuring and capital-formation skills typically found only in traditional finance. She is equally comfortable in a process engineering review and a term-sheet negotiation and uses that range to design innovative financing solutions that map to how these technologies scale.