Exclusive: InnerPlant bags $30m Series B led by its ‘ideal investors’: an alliance of North American farmers

• InnerPlant, which recodes plants’ DNA to improve distress signaling, has raised $30 million in Series B funding.
• An alliance of large North American growers, helmed by Canadian grain operator and ag investor Coutts Agro, led the round.
• Climate investor Systemiq Capital also participated alongside returning investors Deere & Company and Bison Ventures.
• Funding will support the rollout of InnerPlant’s insight platform for soybeans and accelerate the company’s work alongside its seed partners, among other things.

“We’ve always considered farmers our ideal investors’

A group of farmers banding together to lead a fundraising round is rarely seen in the agtech sector and certainly not at this size, which suggests substantial confidence in InnerPlant’s technology.

“We believe InnerPlant is a highly compelling investment, and our team had the idea it would be a powerful statement to do a farmer-led round to accelerate InnerPlant to fulfill their objectives,” Matt Coutts, CIO of Coutts Agro and InnerPlant board member tells AgFunderNews.

“Our network of like-minded friends who are also farmers and who understand the nature of agriculture and the capital markets made for a natural group to try [leading an investment] with. Many of them were aware of InnerPlant before and saw the value of investing on the financial merits, driven by the viewpoint that it is a technology that will deliver substantial value to farmers.”

InnerPlant genetically engineers plants so that they emit a clear signal to growers immediately in the presence of stressors like pests, a lack of nutrients or fungal pressure. The company says its signals are visible from as far away as space and can occur weeks before any other existing technology would be able to alert growers of a problem.

The idea behind the tech is to help farmers reduce losses to pathogens and ultimately increase yields by identifying early on what the stressors are.

InnerPlant’s first commercial product, InnerSoy is a soybean that signals fungal pressure; the company is currently piloting it in Southern Illinois fields in partnership with agriculture cooperative GROWMARK.

“Matt is a longtime friend of the company and a farmer,” explains InnerPlant co-founder and CEO Shely Aronov, adding that the two connected when InnerPlant was first building its InnerCircle farming community. Coutts, who joined the InnerPlant board about two years ago, has invested in past rounds for the startup along with other InnerCircle members.

“When we started fundraising for our series B, we were discussing our ideal lead investor, and at some point, Matt floated the idea of a group of farmers coming together and leading the round,” Aronov tells AgFunderNews. “From there it progressed pretty quickly and the process was a dream as we already knew and trusted each other.”

“We’ve always considered farmers our ideal investors because they’re the ones who benefit from the success of our technology. Matt and the others in the alliance understand that and want to see this technology in the market.”

‘Network coverage’ for plant health

Funding will support the rollout of CropVoice, an insight platform that combines data from a network of InnerSoy plants and gives spray recommendations for fungal infection.

“Think of it as a network of coverage, similar to a cellular network,” explains Aronov. “InnerSoy crops are planted across many plots that provide early warning over a given area — we use counties as a baseline. When a fungal infection is detected in InnerSoy plots in a given county, CropVoice will send alerts to farmers in that area — which in practice will likely be much smaller than a county — so they can take action to protect their yields.”

The CropVoice platform is expected to launch in Illinois and Iowa in 2025 and scale up through 2026 and 2027.

Series B funding will also support R&D work on more stresses and accelerate work currently underway with seed partners to ingress InnerPlant’s traits into elite germplasm in preparation for broad, channel-led seed sales.

Agtech ‘firmly in the production capital stage’

For his part, Coutts doesn’t hold back when expressing his approval for InnerPlant. “InnerPlant’s technology is the most innovative technology I’ve seen in decades,” he notes.

“The status quo for years has been the reformulation of existing products or incremental gains from stacked resistance traits. It’s refreshing and exciting to see truly innovative technology that can enhance the value of the agriculture economy coming to market.”

He adds that the alliance of farmers views the investment from the standpoint of how it will impact their farms and stakeholders.

“By no means do we have privileged access to predicting the future, but we are operating with real-time information that impacts the future of our businesses. We believe this farmer-led round validates that agtech is firmly in the production capital stage of a technology cycle, following the frenzy of financially independent investors.”