The Yield Lab invests in AgriFood Tech companies with technologies focused on crops, animal health, digital agriculture, logistics, and food ingredients. Initial investments range from $100,000 – $1.5M.

The Yield Lab

Driven by a mission to redefine food, Acre invests in companies creating systemic change in the food system to address the growing problems of human and environmental health. Acre makes venture-stage investments in highly disruptive platform businesses across the food value chain, with a particular focus on the agriculture, food tech, and consumer verticals. Taken together, these investments have the ability to form the foundation of an integrated new approach to food system evolution.

Acre Venture Partners

Trailhead Capital is a mission-driven investment firm creating outstanding financial, societal, and ecological returns by backing entrepreneurs who are building the regenerative future of food and agriculture.

Trailhead Capital

We believe that a radical change to our food, agriculture, and ocean sectors is necessary to meet our climate, biodiversity, water, and human health goals. We invest $100-750k in pre-seed and seed-stage companies working to transform these sectors. Our average time to reach a yes / no decision is 15 days (but check back because we update this number live). We keep our investment process targeted so you can go back to building your company.

Ponderosa Ventures

Ascribe Bioscience

Ascribe Bioscience develops products that enable farmers to combat crop pathogens without negative impacts on the environment. The company is currently developing a seed treatment product that acts by boosting crops’ natural defenses. Ascribe Bioscience was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Ithaca, New York.

Ascribe develops natural crop protection products that assist farmers in reducing disease and increasing yields without harming human health or the environment. Its products are based on naturally-occuring small molecules from soil microbiomes that are safe, flexible to fit modern operations, and produce real results in the field. Ascribe’s technology is a proprietary discovery platform that applies metabolomics tools to soil microbiomes to identify small molecules that mediate beneficial interactions between the crops and soil. Its lead product is Phytilax, which acts like a vaccine for plants, and is nontoxic, biodegradable, and non-GMO. Ascribe is a privately held company.

Enhancing seed and crop traits via biotechnology

Crop Biotech

Ascribe Bioscience Raises $2.5M in Seed Funding

Lone Star Industrial Materials is a cultivation company that manufactures raw hemp materials. Its product portfolio consists of bast fiber, refined cellulose, and hemp hurd, seeds, hearts, fines and oil. Additionally, it offers retail products such as HempSorb, animal bedding, and hemp control socks. Hemp requires less land, improves nutritional health, is environmentally friendly, helps soil regeneration, grows in various climates, absorbs a great deal of CO2, is a rotational crop and reduces waste. Hemp is used in construction, insulation, bioplastics, and as hemp wood. The privately held company has developed an end-to-end supply chain from seed genetics to delivery.

Lone Star Industrial Materials

PLANTeDIT operates in the plant genome editing field to produce improved crop species through transformation technology and a CRISPR/Cas9 delivery system. It produces regulatory-free, consumer-oriented, DNA-free and sustainable genome edited crops and biopharmaceuticals. The company’s offering includes non-transgenic high oleic soya, which is produced by mutating the FAD2 gene, which eventually increases the oleic oil content in the soya bean. This product was developed through a collaboration between PLANTeDIT and ToolGen. The organization has also collaborated with RebelBio, University College Cork and IAPB. Headquartered in Cork, Ireland, PLANTeDIT is privately held.

PLANTEDIT

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 Amforo is a biotech company that focuses on developing foods that are high in protein by enhancing the nutritional density of food and feed crops through the platform of technologies it has built. The company offers a family of feed and food crops, including primary ingredients for suppliers of plant-based meat and dairy alternatives. In addition, it is focused on developing a low-cost, plant-based source of protein for farmed seafood. Moreover, Amforo is pursuing approaches to enhance the nutritional profile of crops as well as their protein content, which entails optimizing amino acid profiles, modifying carbohydrates, and enhancing micronutrients.
 
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Amfora

BioHeuris provides weed management solutions by combining synthetic biology and gene editing to develop herbicide resistant crops. Its offering includes Heurik, a technology platform that integrates rational design and directed evolution to identify mutations that confer herbicide tolerance, while Swap is the platform that introduces these mutations in crops using gene editing. The company cultivates soybeans, sorghum, rice, cotton, and alfalfa. It has partnered with Santa Rosa Semillas, Adecoagro, Gensus, GDM, Aceleradora Litoral, Tobin, Rotam, Asociación de Cooperativas Argentinas, Benson Hill, and Plant Science Center. Headquartered in Rosario, Argentina, BioHeuris is privately held with an office in the US.

BioHeuris

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 Tropic Biosciences is a privately held developer of high-performing commercial varieties of tropical crops that promote cultivation efficiencies, improve sustainable environmental practices and enhance consumer health through its use of cutting-edge genetic editing technologies. Its GEiGS Technology combines gene editing and RNAi in a single platform that enables critical disease resistance and quality improvement traits. The technology caters to the banana production, row crops, livestock, and poultry industries. The company’s partners include Temasek, Agronomics, Polaris Founders Capital, and Excellence Through Stewardship. Headquartered in the UK, Tropical Biosciences has been featured in The Telegraph, Nature, Fast Company, and the Financial Times. 
 
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Tropic Biosciences

Companies that develop or use biological, physical and chemical agents and techniques to provide protection and improve the quality of a seed. This includes the sale of seed coating, or seed enhancement products as methods to treat seeds.

Companies that redesign large clusters of genes and gene parts rather than modifying or engineering a single gene for improving the traits of a plant.

Companies that utilize genetic engineering tools and technologies to use existing and naturally present gene variants in a plant and the natural process of breeding such as inbreeding, and linebreeding to develop better traits for plants.

Companies that use transgenesis processes like tissue culturing to develop transgenic plants or seeds by inserting new genes into them from other plants or in certain instances other organisms like bacteria or even animals.

Companies that offer techniques such as epigenetics, RNA interference (RNAi) to temporarily block a specific gene that would trigger unwanted effect such as a disease on a plant.

Companies that develop a platform to insert, edit, or delete the DNA of a plant itself using approaches such as CRISPR-Cas 9, TALENs, and Zinc Fingers. These approaches help develop plant genes or seeds with traits such as disease-resistant, enhanced-performance, or improve yield.

Biotech solutions to produce crops that are sustainable and offer better traits

Offers customization of genes and traits as required by farmers

Uses AI/machine learning to facilitate their platform/biotech processes like gene editing

Ascribe Bioscience

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