Plant-and-soil health company Sound Agriculture has completed a $25 million Series D extension raise.
BMO Impact Investment Fund and S2G Ventures co-led the round.
Emeryville, California-based Sound Agriculture will use the new funding to expand into new products and geographies.
The company also spun out its epigenetics platform for advanced genetics, though company CEO Adam Litle declined to share any granular information on this development. More details are forthcoming, he said.
Sound currently has two products on offer: SOURCE, a “microbiome activator,” is designed to improve nutrient uptake in plants (e.g., nitrogen, phosphorus, etc.), while BLUEPRINT provides arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (ANF) to activate more micronutrients.
‘A data-driven suite of bio-inspired crop nutrition products’
The new funding — a follow-on from 2022’s $75 million Series D — will go towards new products (coming from R&D and partnerships), new geographic expansion and scaling commercially, Litle told AgFunderNews.
“The product strategy is to create the most data-driven suite of bio-inspired crop nutrition products,” he said.
There are hundreds of products available in the soil health/biostimulant category, which makes it tough for growers to know which products are best suited to their operation, and which are efficacious, he added.
“Because we started with this very powerful chemical signaling tech (the company’s SOURCE product), we’re able to increase the activity of things like the ANF product. And there’s a whole suite of additional things we’ll be looking at.”
These products are currently on about 2 million acres in the US, and Sound plans to expand to new geographies and release new products “in the coming years,” according to the company.
Litle said Sound will launch “a new pilot of a product that is synergistic with SOURCE” this spring.
Subsequent products will also be designed to work best with SOURCE, which Litle suggests is a key differentiator for the company.
Building efficient acres
Another differentiator, he said, is Sound Agriculture’s Efficient Acre Incentive, which aims to reduce financial risk for growers interested in replacing synthetic fertilizer with SOURCE.
The Efficient Acre Incentive will pay growers $5/acre for replacing 25 pounds of nitrogen and $5/acre for replacing 25 pounds of phosphorus with SOURCE. Put together, that’s roughly double what other similar incentive offer.
No other plan offers an incentive for phosphorus, he added.
Sound Agriculture will reimburse participating farmers up to $100/acre for yield loss if those yields cannot be maintained while using SOURCE.
Litle says Sound is confident about underwriting these risks because only those with a specific nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) score can participate; growers must also be willing to enroll a minimum of 500 acres.
