Investment Capital at the Vanguard of the AgriFood and Health Transformation
Century-Scale Transformation of AgriFood and Health
Powering the next century of resilient agriculture, prosperous supply chains and thriving population health are food security and national security imperatives—imperatives that are inseparable from our economic leadership, health empowerment and climate positive future. Achieving it demands catalytic investment in breakthrough technologies that address the most complex root-causes of systemic inefficiency and disease, dismantle barriers to sustainable profit and scale bold solutions with the speed and permanence demanded by the century ahead.
This is not an abstraction. It is our lived mandate at Germin8 Ventures—executed through our conviction-led investing, high-touch partnership, deep domain expertise, scientific leadership and culture of operational excellence. Our investment is commercializing the solutions, building the connective tissue and amplifying impact across the AgriFood and Health value chains—catalyzing the revolution this moment requires.
Featured Companies
Avalo
Agriculture is a national security issue inextricably linked with America’s ability to be food secure, economically productive throughout the supply chain, healthy and competitive internationally.
With a powerful AI capable of harnessing the causal genes for breeding complex traits on the fastest timelines—reducing what is normally accomplished over decades to just a short few years or less—Avalo is liberating the most needed genes that already exist in the plant. This will help commercialize varieties which break barriers on the farm and are purpose-designed for society’s most pressing commercial needs, at the pace of business.
While Avalo’s AI yields an asymmetric advantage, make no mistake, this is a market-maker and product-first enterprise leveraging an unmatched ability to empower and transform supply chains from farm to manufacturer.
Bushel
Bushel® co-founders, Jake Joranstaad and Ryan Raguse, are technologists with roots in agriculture, are in-touch with system needs, are authentic community-builders and they have a clear vision to be the digital thread that connects and enhances business operations across the agriculture value chain.
Bushel has taken on the worthy challenge of connecting disjointed systems in the grain industry, creating the digital infrastructure supplying business intelligence and workflow solutions to farmers and agribusinesses at the moments they need it most. Additionally, Bushel has expanded its platform with powerful financial tools offering immediate payments, business accounts with competitive rates and integration with leading providers of credit.
Bushel now powers more than 3,500 grain and ag retail facilities, representing more than 50% of U.S. and Canadian grain origination. Over 100,000 farmers trust Bushel’s technology, making it one of the largest technology networks in U.S. agribusiness.
Bushel
Bushel® co-founders, Jake Joranstaad and Ryan Raguse, are technologists with roots in agriculture, are in-touch with system needs, are authentic community-builders and they have a clear vision to be the digital thread that connects and enhances business operations across the agriculture value chain.
Bushel has taken on the worthy challenge of connecting disjointed systems in the grain industry, creating the digital infrastructure supplying business intelligence and workflow solutions to farmers and agribusinesses at the moments they need it most. Additionally, Bushel has expanded its platform with powerful financial tools offering immediate payments, business accounts with competitive rates and integration with leading providers of credit.
Bushel now powers more than 3,500 grain and ag retail facilities, representing more than 50% of U.S. and Canadian grain origination. Over 100,000 farmers trust Bushel’s technology, making it one of the largest technology networks in U.S. agribusiness.
Matterworks
Raw biological data is almost entirely unstructured and it is interpreted in very narrow and biased ways which discards 99.9% that is dark data. $50B of installed instruments discard 45 exabytes (45B gigabytes) of dark data per year across omic modalities, because biology lacks the semantic foundation for exploiting unstructured data.
Matterworks is the category-defining pioneer unlocking unstructured molecular data for predictive biology. Matterworks’ Large Spectral Models (LSMs) productize self-supervised machine intelligence for direct machine interpretation of molecular-omic data. Pyxis™, released in 2024, is the first generative AI for complete untargeted molecular annotation, unlocking new data modalities for understanding and predicting complex biological outcomes. Pyxis™ combines three breakthrough capabilities in one platform: state-of-the-art identification algorithms based on the LSM, a comprehensive built-in reference library and complete cloud-based analysis workflow. Pyxis™ handles all method development, analyte identification and analyte quantitation at scale across all small molecule modalities—from metabolomics to lipidomics, proteomics and beyond.
Pyxis™ is designed for bench scientists and analytical chemists regardless of bioinformatics experience. Users simply upload their mass spec data and get results. No coding or command-line tools required.
Matterworks is ushering powerful new applications of omics data, capable of bending the life sciences success curve in favor of bringing forth therapeutic solutions to society’s most critical health needs.
Kanvas
Across life and nutritional sciences, researchers are striving to unlock the human gut microbiome’s potential to revolutionize the prevention and treatment of chronic inflammatory diseases and beyond. While omics technologies like spatial biology have advanced the field, current tools fail to classify and connect microbial and host activity insights effectively.
Kanvas has developed a pioneering spatial biology platform that maps host-microbiome interactions at a first-ever sub-cellular level. This technology, known as HiPR-FISH, enables multi-omics visualization by spatially measuring mRNA, rRNA and proteins across various tissue types. In addition to Kanvas’ unparalleled ability to spatially map the interactions foundational to harnessing the microbiome for health, the company has achieved unprecedented biomanufacturing breakthroughs. Kanvas’ Anaerobic Co-culture Technology (“ACT”) ensures reproducible manufacturing of complex consortia containing hundreds of members mirroring a healthy gut microbiome.
Kanvas is uniquely positioned to develop novel Live Biotherapeutic Products (“LBPs”) that show promise in significantly improving the lives of patients living with microbiome-related diseases.
Kanvas
Across life and nutritional sciences, researchers are striving to unlock the human gut microbiome’s potential to revolutionize the prevention and treatment of chronic inflammatory diseases and beyond. While omics technologies like spatial biology have advanced the field, current tools fail to classify and connect microbial and host activity insights effectively.
Kanvas has developed a pioneering spatial biology platform that maps host-microbiome interactions at a first-ever sub-cellular level. This technology, known as HiPR-FISH, enables multi-omics visualization by spatially measuring mRNA, rRNA and proteins across various tissue types. In addition to Kanvas’ unparalleled ability to spatially map the interactions foundational to harnessing the microbiome for health, the company has achieved unprecedented biomanufacturing breakthroughs. Kanvas’ Anaerobic Co-culture Technology (“ACT”) ensures reproducible manufacturing of complex consortia containing hundreds of members mirroring a healthy gut microbiome.
Kanvas is uniquely positioned to develop novel Live Biotherapeutic Products (“LBPs”) that show promise in significantly improving the lives of patients living with microbiome-related diseases.
Portfolio Companies
