Led · Series A · Oct 2025

Ascribe Bioscience is an Ithaca, NY-based agricultural technology company founded in 2017 out of research at the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University. The company’s small-molecule platform taps compounds from the soil microbiome to create environmentally friendly crop-protection products that match the ease of use and cost profile of conventional chemicals. Its lead product, Phytalix, is positioned as a broad-spectrum “biofungicide without compromise,” offering sustainable disease control alongside practical on-farm performance. Ascribe plans to ramp manufacturing and begin early commercialization, targeting first regulatory approval in Brazil later this year with the United States and additional markets to follow. Proceeds from its recent financing will also advance further R&D on next-generation natural crop-protection solutions. While the company has not disclosed revenue or user metrics, investors cite “dramatic yield gains” in field trials as validation of its technology. Overall, Ascribe aims to provide farmers worldwide with highly effective, sustainable tools to improve crop resilience and yields.

Participated · Series A · Jan 2025

Bonsai Robotics builds vision-based physical AI solutions for orchard and specialty-crop agriculture, with a flagship product called Visionsteer™ that offers data insights, crop analysis, job planning, notifications and autonomous vehicle control. The company’s technology is designed to operate in GNSS-denied environments and without cellular or internet connectivity, addressing harsh field conditions like dust, darkness, debris and vibration. Bonsai has deployed over 40 integrated autonomous units across the U.S. and Australia and has collected data from operations on more than 500,000 acres. The new funding will be used to enhance its vision-based autonomous software, expand its physical AI platform and dataset, grow OEM partnerships, and accelerate commercialization. Bonsai positions its approach as addressing labor shortages, rising grower costs, climate change and food-security challenges in specialty agriculture. Bonsai Robotics, based in San Jose, CA, provides computer vision-based robotic automation solutions for harsh, off-road environments such as agriculture. Its systems integrate with OEM equipment to enable autonomy and can operate without GPS in adverse conditions including dust, debris and vibration. Led by CEO Tyler Niday, the company works with OEMs including OMC and Flory Industries and with California growers who report significant efficiency gains amid a severe labor shortage. The company raised $13.5M in Seed funding and plans to use the proceeds to accelerate its product roadmap and invest in hiring and sales and marketing. Its product focus is on ruggedizing autonomy for environments where traditional GPS-reliant approaches fail.

Participated · Series A · Dec 2024

Terradot develops and deploys enhanced rock weathering (ERW) to remove CO₂ by spreading finely ground rock on agricultural land and building MRV tools and a digital platform to scale the approach. The company has run scaled pilots in Brazil, spreading over 48,000 tons of rock across 1,800 hectares and reporting promising early results on tropical weathering rates. Terradot has sold nearly 300,000 tonnes of CO₂ removal through signed agreements, including a 90,000-tonne, $27M purchase facilitated by Frontier and a separate 200,000-tonne purchase by Google for 2029 and beyond. The startup is partnering with EMBRAPA and Brazilian industry, government, and academic partners to develop scalable ERW frameworks and leverage local agricultural and quarry proximity. It is building MRV capabilities using soil-core measurements, reactive transport models, geostatistics, and watershed-level measurements to enable high-quality, lower-cost quantification at scale. The founding science and operations team is drawn from Stanford and national labs, and the company intends to commercialize ERW at gigaton scale within the decade.

Led · Series A · Jan 2024

Farm-ng develops a modular robotic system called Amiga that can be configured like "Legos" to perform a broad set of farm tasks. The company is Bay Area–based and was founded right at the beginning of the pandemic. Its Amiga units have been deployed in the field—about 100 units in less than 18 months—and the company emphasizes low-cost, mechanically accessible designs that farmers can adapt and maintain. Farm-ng says Amiga deployments deliver quick ROI, citing a customer study that reported weekly labor-hour reductions of 50% to 80% across seeding, weeding and compost spreading. The startup plans to use new funding to ramp up production at its Watsonville manufacturing plant in the Pajaro Valley. Nvidia veteran Claire Delaunay is the company’s CTO and discusses modularity and extensibility as core product principles.

Led · Series A · Aug 2023

Highlight operates an in-home product testing platform that automates product research and consolidates multiple testing steps into a single interface. Founded in 2020 by Dana Kim and Ethan Kellough, the company manages a community of over 25,000 “Highlighters” who receive products and provide feedback, enabling hundreds of brands to run thousands of tests. Customers include Nestlé, Estée Lauder, P&G, Target, Sakara and Hanes, and the company says it has more than tripled its revenue, employees and customer base. Highlight uploads community feedback in real time into dashboards that let brands set up tests quickly and scale them, reducing a process that previously took hundreds of emails and months into minutes. The company is moving from a product testing platform toward a product intelligence platform, focusing on agile insights, real-time dashboards and an unfair data advantage. Planned roadmap features include more self-service experiences with templates and wizards, onboarding the waitlist of Highlighters, iterating on user experience, and hiring additional employees. Highlight operates an in-home user testing (IHUT) platform that delivers physical products to participants' homes so brands can gather targeted, real-world feedback quickly. The company combines proprietary technology and an engaged consumer panel to speed and improve the accuracy of product testing. Since launching in 2021, Highlight has powered agile testing for over 100 partners, tested hundreds of products, sent thousands of boxes, and completed tens of thousands of surveys. Customers range from early-stage brands such as Partake, Avec, Love Corn, and Sakara to enterprise CPG companies including Nestle, P&G, and Estée Lauder. Most Agile IHUTs deliver initial feedback within a few days and complete within roughly a month, enabling use cases from early development tests to blind competitive benchmarks. Highlight has raised $8.2M to date and plans to use new capital to hire and accelerate growth to further its mission of improving physical product development.