Our FoodTech & AgTech Investments
Portfolio Companies
We invest in top technologists and visionary creators with solutions on a path to exceptionally high impact, rapid scalability and the establishment of new value networks that enable further building towards a brighter future.
ranch management software for efficient, profitable and sustainable livestock production
AgriWebb, through its ranch management software and data, empowers farmers, ranchers and others in the beef supply chain (animal feed, health, financing and meat processing) to visualize, connect, and leverage actionable business insights to inform a more profitable, efficient, traceable and sustainable future for meat production.
AgriWebb is the first to put the cow in the cloud and optimize the interoperable productivity and health of the herd, pasture and rancher. Today, over 19 million head are being managed by more than 16,000 farmers across more than 136 million acres on AgriWebb’s global SaaS platform and its users have users have seen livestock production performance increases of +20% through the use of the software. Industry-leading packers, processors, financiers and other stakeholders are also subscribing to AgriWebb’s data ecosystem. Meanwhile, as a result of its data collection for maximizing productive grassland grazing, AgriWebb has also generated the world’s largest ground truth database for carbon credits and regenerative grazing sequestration.
AgriWebb is proving that livestock production and sustainable stewardship do not have to be at odds.
Founders
Justin Webb
Co-Founder & Chairman
Kevin Baum
Co-Founder & CEO
John Fargher
Co-Founder & CRO
Location
New South Wales, Australia
Jobs
Cultivating Plants to Challenge Status Quo Definitions of “Plant-Based”
Founded and led by Magi Richani, Alpine Bio creates key dairy proteins, including casein, from high-quality soybeans, enabling the brand to make cheeses that taste, smell, melt, stretch, and even age like those made from animals, and challenging the way we talk about, think about, and eat cheese.
Caseins – essential dairy proteins – play a crucial role in giving cheese the qualities we love. Like all proteins, caseins have a unique genetic code. Alpine Bio discovered how to recreate this genetic code in soybean seeds and grow soybean plants that have the same dairy caseins found in animal milks. Today, Alpine Bio can produce more caseins per acre more efficiently, sustainably, and cost effectively than cows, while enabling a prosperous opportunity for its farmer partners.
Alpine Bio is transforming the food system, challenging people’s perceptions of what plant-based cheese can be, and pioneering a new class of satisfying animal-free cheese for the 99% unwilling to compromise on taste, cost, melting and stretching.
Founders
Magi Richani
Founder & CEO
Location
SF Bay Area
Jobs
Alpine Bio Careers
Empowering Microbes With Breakthrough Seed Integration
Andes uses synthetic biology tools and nature’s finest to enable the broad use of microbial technology for positive action against climate change. Its integrated platform uses a breakthrough delivery method, Microprime™, which is based on the use of seeds as safe vessels for microbes and a unique set of microbial strains, each working as a chassis for enhanced features. This seamless and stable integration allows any grower around the globe to harness the power of microbial technology as never experienced before.
Andes has developed the world’s first true integration between seeds and microbes and its first products reliably drive biological nitrogen fixation, enabling crops to draw down nitrogen from the air instead of relying on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. Additionally, Andes is developing microbial strains for nature-based permanent carbon capture solutions, among others.
Founders
Gonzalo Fuenzalida
Co-Founder & CEO
Tania Timmermann Aranis
Co-Founder & CTO
Location
San Francisco Bay Area
Jobs
andes.bio/careers
INTERPRETABLE MACHINE LEARNING TO CAPITALIZE ON HIDDEN GENETIC POTENTIAL FOR COMPLEX TRAITS WHICH FUTURE-PROOF AGRICULTURE
Complex agronomic traits of crops are controlled by myriads of genes, environments, gene-gene interactions and gene-environment interactions. While the past few years have seen an improvement in our understanding of this intricate interplay, barriers still exist when needing to identify multiple causal genes and the molecular mechanisms driving variants when developing novel crop varietals.
Avalo uses interpretable machine learning and evolutionary biology to rapidly design new crops for agriculture’s changing climate and pressures, leveraging the natural diversity of crop species and enhanced breeding techniques. Avalo’s climate resilient, eco-friendly crops result in high-quality natural products, which unlock vital economic value throughout whole supply chains.
Founders
Brendan Collins
Co-Founder & CEO
Mariano Alvarez, Ph.D.
Co-Founder & CSO
Location
Research Triangle Park, NC
Jobs
Harvesting Nature’s Intelligence
Brightseed™ applies advanced computational intelligence to map nature’s wealth of bioactive phytonutrients that promote health and wellness. Brightseed’s discovery engine—named Forager™—indexes the vast molecular information of plants so that we can search and incorporate targeted health-beneficial compounds into our diets to solve unmet human needs.
By harvesting nature’s intelligence Brightseed transforms the modern diet from a cause of chronic illness to a source of health.
Founders
Jim Flatt, PhD
Co-Founder & CEO
Sofia Elizondo
Co-Founder & COO
Lee Chae, PhD
Co-Founder & CTO
Location
San Francisco Bay Area
Powering the digital infrastructure for the grain industry
Bushel™ establishes a digital infrastructure, connecting and automating disjointed systems throughout the grain industry, in order to enhance the interactions between growers and grain receiving locations that optimizes efficiency and cash flow. Bushel digitizes manual, error-prone activities related to cash bidding, scale tickets, prepaids, contracts and deliveries, with real-time information and notifications through grain receiver-branded mobile apps.
Infrastructure could be considered the greatest advancement in the grain industry in the last century. Today, Bushel is the revolutionary digital thread driving the grain industry forward in unprecedented and unlimited ways.
Founders
Jake Joraanstad
Co-Founder & CEO
Ryan Raguse
Co-Founder & Chief Product
& Strategy Officer
Location
Fargo, ND
The Internet of Soil for Data-Driven Farming
CropX Technologies© is the world’s most advanced and scalable platform for data-driven farming with integrated agronomic data from both above and below ground. With CropX, farmers optimize input application, leading to significant water, fertilizer, energy and labor savings. CropX’s models constantly adapt to the crop’s growth stage and to the changing conditions of the soil and weather, to provide crop-specific recommendations that help farmers get the most out of their fields. Moreover, optimizing inputs and monitoring the movement of water and agrichemicals in the soil leads to minimizing environmental pollution and preventing leaching, runoff and unnecessary resource expenditures–making farming sustainable.
Founder
Tomer Tzach
CEO
Locations
Israel
Omaha, NE
Jobs
cropx.com/contact-us/
Revolutionizing Crop Protection Discovery
Enko Chem combines DNA-encoded libraries, sophisticated AI and agrochemical expertise to revolutionize the discovery and development of small molecule crop protection products. Whereas the majority of crop protection products are outdated, off-patent and ineffective, Enko Chem is reinventing the pipeline for novel chemistry that is vitally important to crop performance, reliable, safe and environmentally-minded.
Enko Chem’s discovery platform gives agrochemistry the next-gen re-boot that it needs, with a cutting-edge arsenal of tools to develop better protection for our crops, maintain the earth they’re planted in, and safely nourish the world. Enko is an ambitious game-changer tackling mission-critical needs for farmers globally, including the emerging markets.
Founder
Jacqueline Heard, PhD
Founder & CEO
Locations
Mystic, CT
Jobs
enko.ag/careers
Providing Remote Visibility into Field Activities
As agriculture’s leading AI-enabled smart farming platform, Fieldin™ transforms farms into data-driven assembly lines, optimizing production, improving yields and providing full visibility for the world’s production of fruits, nuts, vegetables and beyond.
Fieldin’s smart farming platform helps specialty crop growers manage and optimize pesticide applications, harvest activities and other critical field operations and cultural practices. The visibility, control and actionable data offered through Fieldin is unparalleled, unlocking game-changing efficiencies and transparency on-farm and throughout the agribusiness supply chain.
Founders
Boaz Bachar
Co-founder & CEO
Iftach Birger
Co-founder & COO
Locations
SF Bay Area
Fresno, CA
Israel
Australia
Jobs
fieldin.com/careers/
CUTTING-EDGE IMAGING, MAPPING OF HOST-MICROBIOME INTERACTIONS TO REVOLUTIONIZE HEALTH
Many companies, health providers and researchers aim to enhance understanding of the complex human gut microbiome to prevent and treat chronic inflammatory diseases and more. However, insights have been constrained by a lack of technology to better understand host-microbiome interactions.
This is where Kanvas Biosciences comes in. Kanvas has developed a novel platform that spatially maps host-microbiome interactions. Akin to a “Google Maps” for the microbiome, Kanvas’ platform uses probes that bind to specific areas of interest in the microbiome and host tissue, labeling them with up to 1 billion distinct molecular barcodes. Their technology called “HiPR-FISH” can label mRNA, rRNA and proteins at a subcellular level. Additionally, the company has achieved a manufacturing breakthrough that ensures reproducible production of complex consortia of microbes mirroring the “normal” gut microbiome. This advancement has transformed Kanvas from a spatial biology platform to a full-stack therapeutics company.
The company’s initial focus was using its platform to study the microbiome of a healthy human super donor, developing a drug candidate composed of a reproducible consortia of bacterial strains that mimic a healthy microbiome. Their lead candidate, KAN-001, aims to enhance the efficacy of immunotherapies in cancer patients and has demonstrated tumor growth inhibition in mouse models. Kanvas is now preparing for a clinical study.
Since Kanvas’ platform can be used for any specimen type including plants and soils, it opens up future applications in agriculture to better understand soil microbiome and plant interactions as well as food safety.
Founders
Matthew Cheng, MD
Co-Founder & CEO
Hao Shi, PhD
Co-Founder & CTO
Iwijn De Vlaminck, PhD
Co-Founder & Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board
Location
Princeton, NJ
San Francisco, CA
Biochemistry’s First Large Spectral Model – An LLM-Like Semantic Foundation
Biotechnology is increasingly the engine that drives therapies for our deadliest diseases, nutrition to feed a growing global population, and energy & materials for a sustainable future. Yet biological data is almost entirely unstructured, especially challenging to analyze, and most of its riches are discarded.
Matterworks has built the first Large Spectral Model – an LLM-like semantic foundation for directly interpreting raw instrument data that offers an AI breakthrough for biochemistry and the omics. It exploits this breakthrough by first introducing an AI-enabled software for whole metabolome reading, solving the mass spec holy-grail of absolute quantitative metabolomics. Additionally, Matterworks partners with leading lifesciences companies to build fine-tuned AI models which leverage the LSM for specific applications.
Founders
Jack Geremia, PhD
CEO & Co-Founder
Mimoun Cadosch Delmar
CTO & Co-Founder
Location
Cambridge, MA
Jobs
jobs.lever.co/matterworks
INDUSTRY-FIRST ELECTRONIC SUBMISSIONS, MODERNIZING FARM REPORTING TO THE USDA
As a requirement for participating in federal farm programs, the USDA and its partnering agencies require growers to file reports every growing season. The data collected on these reports flows throughout the USDA informing policy, agricultural statistics and how the USDA serves growers through its federal programs and services. Currently reporting is painstakingly manual and redundant with growers providing identical data points to multiple USDA participating agencies in a process rife with inefficiencies and prone to human error.
MyAgData’s interoperable data infrastructure digitizes the producer reporting process with proprietary data connections to the USDA. On the growers’ behalf, MyAgData’s platform uses growers’ own equipment data to populate and file reports with the USDA in their accepted data standard and digital exchange. In return, the USDA receives high-fidelity and accurate ground-truth data from growers. This removes the burden and saves material costs on both sides, as well as enables powerful new abilities for data interoperability and exchange throughout agribusiness.
Founders
Michelle Tressel
CEO
Don Bierman
Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer
Location
Fargo, ND
Jobs
MyAgData.com/careers