The duo is hoping to smash one of the biggest barriers to biologics adoption by providing farmers with a way to cultivate living microbial inputs on the farm that cannot survive in the current supply chain without cold storage.
Nitrogen fertilizer is widely used in row crop production and is a key expense farmers face each year. But often that fertilizer is wasted, washing away after heavy rains or leaching due to irrigation or poor soil quality.
The round coincides with a new partnership with Penny Newman to launch a new soil amendment product onto the market that has the potential to reduce nitrogen application by 30% over 3 growing seasons.
“Pivot Bio is addressing one of the largest sources of GHGs on the planet – the potent nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide emissions associated with the use of synthetic fertilizers,” said Carmichael Roberts of Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
These provisions include funding for a new USDA pilot project that will incentivize farmers, through payments, to adopt agricultural practices aimed at improving soil health and sequestering organic soil carbon.
Biologicals startup Inocucor has acquired ATP Nutrition in the opening salvo of a plan to become a “selective consolidator” in the premium crop inputs space.
One agrifood tech VC vet heads from Monsanto Growth Ventures to Temasek while indoor growers get together to develop industry safety standards, plus agtech M&A in this week's brief.
We caught up with Adrian Percy, global head of R&D for Crop Science at Bayer on the sidelines of the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit, to discuss the company's open innovation strategies in the area of biologicals and novel crop inputs.
Bayer and Ginkgo Bioworks announced the partnership in September 2017. The partners jointly invested $100 million in the venture, making the deal the second largest deal from an Ag Biotechnology startup in 2017, according to the AgFunder data.
Micropep Technologies, a French ag biotechnology company has raised a €4 million ($4.94 million) Series A round of funding. Micropep is developing crop enhancement products using micro-RNA or miRNA.
Boost Biomes uses DNA-sequencing to study microbiomes and identify interactions that have desired outcomes -- in this case, combatting common crop threats.
Syngenta Ventures has a new managing director in Colin Steen, a Syngenta-veteran with venture experience from the early, early days of venture-backed agtech.
Inocucor manufactures biological stimulants for agriculture using a patented fermentation process to combine multi-strains of bacteria and yeasts into soil and plant optimizers. It has two products on the market today that aim to enhance the growth of crops.
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The new funding will go toward building out the company’s “Bioworks3” production facility and branching out into more industries beyond the company’s mainstays of agriculture and pharmaceuticals.
Indigo's business model, which it is deploying funds to build out across the US, Argentina, and Australia, is as much a part of its offering as its business model, according to agtech insiders.
