InnerPlant is an advanced sensor seed AgTech platform on a mission to transform farming by enabling crops to communicate with growers, creating a more resilient and sustainable farming system. The Company is creating crops that communicate via signaling through fluorescent proteins produced in their leaves to warn farmers of stress caused by fungi, drought, pests, diseases, and nutrient deficiencies. These signaling proteins convert plants into living sensors that provide early signals for various forms of distress experienced by crops.
InnerPlant is an advanced sensor seed AgTech platform on a mission to transform farming by enabling crops to communicate with growers, creating a more resilient and sustainable farming system. This is exclusively a SPV investment opportunity for our member investors looking to make direct investments. We are taking commitments here until November 10. Contact us if you are interested in learning more
InnerPlant’s co-founders were inspired to create a company making a lasting, positive impact on the world through sustainable agriculture. Shely was exposed to her family’s work in biosensor technology, and Rod grew up on a farm before beginning his career in a plant genetics lab. Both saw the challenges facing farmers in the modern agriculture industry, such as the $37B spent on plant chemicals each year while $40B of yield is still lost, despite rampant over-application of herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizer. InnerPlant’s technology platform is aimed at contributing to a healthier soil and climate while easing global food chain supply challenges to sustainably feed the world. By digitizing a plant’s stress with InnerPlant’s proprietary living sensor technology, the Company can quickly spotlight areas of concern allowing farmers to execute on an appropriate plan such as picking the right treatment at the right place and the right time to protect crops and yields. InnerPlant’s Smart Seeds signal their needs in a scalable, affordable way to reduce chemical use and increase crop yields. Data driven farming at the plant level will allow profitability and sustainability to finally coexist. InnerPlant provides plants the ability to communicate with their growers via fluorescent signaling expressing their exact need in distress.
Plum Alley is excited to announce a new Series A investment opportunity in InnerPlant. The Company has already closed $16 Million in funding led by Deere & Co. at a pre-money valuation of $65M. The Board has approved an extension for Plum Alley's participation in a second close, securing allocation for both Plum Alley Investor Members and the Plum Alley Ventures Fund I. Notable investors from the first close include:
- Deere & Company: As the largest farm equipment manufacturer in the world, Deere possesses a market cap of $115B and annual revenues of $40B+, and has a Company mandate to digitize and electrify their business by 2026. Deere’s agriculture business has prioritized their “See & Spray™” tractor technology, focused on cost savings and an effective herbicide-resistant weed-elimination strategy for farmers and growers. Deere will be partnering with InnerPlant for their tractors to liaise and collaborate with InnerPlant’s sensor seeds and drive significant value for growers.
- MS&AD Ventures: the $200M corporate venture arm of MS&AD Group, a publicly listed Japanese insurance company including Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance and Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance.
- Bee Partners: focused on investing in human-machine convergences finding new efficiencies. Notable investments include Indiegogo, New Culture, and statmuse.
- UpWest: Israeli-focused Seed investors across industries specializing in US expansion. Notable investments include SentinelOne, Airobotics, CyberX, and Exo Technologies.
As noted, the Company has also secured a joint development agreement with John Deere towards commercial strategy on early detection and early action technologies needed to deliver the promised future of farming.
The Series A funds will be used to finalize and scale the Company's go-to-market product, including regulatory approval, finalize the detection platform with satellite, drone and tractor-based sensors, and provide InnerPlant a runway through 2024 and its commercial launch. Previous investors include TAU Ventures, Gaingels, and StartX Ventures, among others.
Fundraising history: InnerPlant has raised $22M in funding to date:
- $5.65M in Seed funding (2021) with a $30M post-money valuation
- $16M in Series A at a $65M pre-money valuation
Fundraising history:
InnerPlant has raised $22M in funding to date:
- $5.65M in Seed funding (2021) with a $30M post-money valuation
- $16M in Series A at a $65M pre-money valuation
Landscape: Stagnating Competition
The current seed market is highly monopolized, with 60% of the global seed market controlled by just four companies: Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta and BASF. However, since Bayer launched the first GMO seed, ReadyRoundup, in 1996, the industry has failed to achieve meaningful innovation beyond building off of the same core traits that continue to lose efficacy due to natural weed resistances, despite a 300% increase in seed prices over the same period.
In addition to the large market opportunity, current market dynamics provide a significant opportunity for new seed stack technologies to enter the ecosystem as patents for widely used soybean traits are expiring:
As the below chart shows, these traits are all iterative, and based on the original glyphosate HT trait launched by Bayer in 1996. Stagnating R&D pipelines amongst the major 4 seed providers and legal liabilities (Bayer has settled over 100,000 Roundup lawsuits for $11B as of May 2022), provide significant opportunity for InnerPlant’s novel seed technology stack.
Competition as Partners
Bayer, Corteva, and BASF, along with other industry players, are all potential partners and users of InnerPlant’s seed sensor technology, which will allow them to further strengthen their innovation and application capabilities for their seed buyers and distributors.
Additionally, smaller seed producers, like Syngenta (25% of US soybean seed sales), Stine (66% U.S. genetics penetration), and GDM (33% of global soybean germplasms), are all currently licensing traits from the above major players, and are eager to transition towards new proprietary technology stacks to secure greater market shares with growers. InnerPlant has already signed a licensing agreement with GDM, and is in late stage discussions with both Syngenta and Stine.
Adoption: Future-proofing
The technology for identifying specific stress traits in a seed is already prevalent in the current seed market. However, InnerPlant’s proprietary and patented technology allows it to add fluorescent reporter genes to these natural response pathways, resulting in living sensors that can communicate via fluorescent proteins produced in plant leaves. While InnerPlant is bringing a new tech stack to existing seeds, these seeds are already modified to be herbicide tolerant. It is important to note that 93% of soybean seeds are already modified to be herbicide tolerant, as in genetically modified seeds. The following chart outlines the adoption rate of the initial Herbicide Tolerant (HT) soybean product launched by Bayer in 1996, showcasing the speed with which the agriculture market adopts new technologies that promise improved yields.
InnerPlant’s business model is enabled by key partnerships throughout the seed ecosystem, from seed trait biotech firms, seed genetics manufacturers, seed distributors, data providers and ultimately the farmers themselves.
InnerPlant has secured key partnerships in advance of the initial commercial launch in 2024 and built a foundation across the ecosystem to maximize adoption of its Smart Seed technology.
Seeds
InnerPlant has secured signed partnerships with multiple seed manufacturers that will allow the Company to embed its proprietary signaling technology into current product offerings, and make use of existing distribution channels to reach farmers. In addition to late stage discussions with major players in the space like Stine and Syngenta, InnerPlant has secured a contract with GDM, the largest soybean genetics producer in South America (65M acres). InnerPlant and GDM are partnering on a large US expansion strategy, with a goal of achieving a 6% market share by 2023.
InnerPlant is able to offer a superior sensor and technology seed at price parity with current traditional seeds. This is made possible through a licensing business model with seed manufacturers. The seed manufacturers are able to sell the innovative Smart Seed at the same price to current offerings. The Smart Seeds have all the same traits that current seed products offer, plus InnerPlant’s unique stress signaling traits for fungal and insect detection, unlocking yields, reducing overall input costs, and providing confidence for farmers.
Detection and Data
Once InnerPlant’s seeds make it into the field, the next phase of the Company’s business model comes into play in detecting and collecting the sensor plants’ fluorescent light. In conjunction with the Series A investment, InnerPlant has secured a Joint Development Agreement (JDA) with Deere & Company, the largest farm equipment manufacturer in the world. Deere’s next-gen tractors will feature ‘See and Spray’ technology, which utilizes computer vision and machine learning techniques to selectively target weeds, reducing herbicide usage and cutting costs. The JDA will allow Deere and InnerPlant to work together to harness InnerPlant’s breakthrough biosensor technology and unlock further value for Deere customers.
In addition, InnerPlant has signed an agreement with Satellogic, a market leader in satellite imagery and monitoring, to develop a custom satellite sensor that will meet user requirements in data collection based on farmer feedback. This technology will utilize the Passive Detection methodology to provide constant monitoring to farmers in all conditions, and provide another channel for farmers without the existing equipment to actively collect data.
Revenue Streams
InnerPlant will have three core revenue streams upon the commercial launch in 2024.
Since the Company was founded in 2018, InnerPlant has worked with farmers to hone in on how the biosensor technology can best serve their needs. The InnerPlant InnerCircle is a paid farmer community that is actively supporting the commercialization of Smart Seeds. With 70 members across 11 states representing 350k acres of farmland, the InnerCircle has allowed InnerPlant to build market demand prior to commercialization.
Technology & Product
There are three main components to InnerPlant’s smart seed ecosystem:Sensor Seed: The seed itself contains InnerPlant’s proprietary living sensor trait, and is paired with high quality genetics through partnerships with established seed companies like GDM and Stine. The core of InnerPlant’s breakthrough AgTech platform lies in the Company’s ability to encode signaling capabilities into plants’ DNA, which allows them to create unique fluorescent proteins in the leaves when under stress. This signal not only serves as an early warning system for farmers, but further identifies the type of stressor based on the color of the fluorescence. InnerPlant is able to achieve these results by relying on a plant’s natural adaptation response to stress via gene expression.
The Company uses a combination of data science, AI/machine learning, and molecular analysis to identify the most promising genes in a specific crop that precisely report the target commercial stresses in the field. The below chart showcases this process with soybean plants, showcasing the different genes that are expressed in response to different stressors. Once these genes are identified, InnerPlant can insert a proprietary signaling gene that will enable the plant to produce fluorescent proteins in response to the stress.
Reading the Bio-Sensors
In order to make use of the signaling capabilities encoded into the sensor plants, InnerPlant has also developed a methodology for reading the fluorescent light emitted from plant leaves. The Company ‘disentangles’ the fluorescence (new light) from sunlight using endmember analysis of upwelling light reflected from the plant. Because the new fluorescent light has a different spectral signature than light originating from the sun (and reflected off the plant leaf), InnerPlant is able to isolate it to interpret the color and subsequent stressor the plant is facing. Further details on InnerPlant’s technology is available in the data room and Plum Alley Investment Memo.
Intelligent Insights
The final segment of InnerPlant’s technology platform is the analytics engine that provides farmers with the data they need to proactively and rapidly respond to plant stressors in their fields. With a variety of data collection tools that will be in place by the commercial launch in 2024, farmers will be able to manage their data in a convenient user app with API integrations. In addition to the immediate alerts to their own fields, InnerPlant plans to apply predictive analytics to the data lake built across customers, providing farmers with recommendations to enhance yields and minimize costs.
Shely Aronov, Co-Founder & CEO: With a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering from Tel Aviv University and an MBA in Entrepreneurship from Stanford, Shely brings extensive experience as a founder and operator across CPG, logistics, and construction sectors. Prior to founding InnerPlant in 2018, she founded and grew a CPG company to $1M in revenues before a successful exit.
Rod Kumimoto, PhD, Co-Founder & CSO: Rod was awarded a Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from UC Davis, and earned a PhD in Plant Biology from the University of Oklahoma. He brings over 15 years of research experience at Mendel Biotech, University of Oklahoma, and UC Davis to InnerPlant, and holds 17 patents.
Ari Kornfeld, PhD, Technical Co-Founder & Director of Detection Technologies: Prior to 10 years as a researcher and consultant at the Carnegie Institute of Science, Ari received a Master’s degree in Math Modeling/Plant Physiology from Humbolt State University, and a PhD in Plant Ecophysiology from the University of Canterbury. During his time at the Carnegie Institute of Science, he designed, developed, and deployed instruments and software for measuring plant photosynthesis using remote sensing of solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence and analysis of subsequent data. These breakthroughs form the core of InnerPlant’s technology.
Advisors:
InnerPlant has built a strong team of advisors and investors, with critical experience in farming OEMs, SaaS enterprises, and agricultural finance.
* based on current carbon credit averages
InnerPlant has the potential to fundamentally change the current farming system, providing a safe and economical path off the chemical treadmill. With the current dependency on herbicidal and pest-resistant traits to enable widespread chemical applications, $37B is spent on chemicals each year. However, despite a 30% overapplication rate, $40B of yield, or 20%, is still lost each year to pathogens. InnerPlant’s technology can help reduce the mass application of chemicals in farming, resulting in improved environmental health while improving yields and margins for farmers.
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