Participated · Series A · Apr 2024

Peptobiotics is an agricultural-technology solutions provider focused on recombinant antimicrobial peptide technology. The company’s technology is aimed at reducing dependence on antibiotics in the livestock and aquaculture sectors. Peptobiotics announced an oversubscribed $6.2 million Series A financing. The round was led by Hatch Blue via its Blue Revolution Fund. Existing investors including Trendlines Agrifood Fund, Ponderosa Ventures, The Yield Lab Asia Pacific, Seeds Capital, Seventure Partners, GrainCorp Ventures and Farmabase participated. No operating metrics, founding year, or location were disclosed in the article.

Participated · Series A · Dec 2023

Fasal develops a patented IoT-SaaS platform that delivers farm-level, crop-specific and crop-stage specific actionable intelligence for progressive horticulture farmers. Its platform provides real-time crop growing intelligence to Indian farmers to enable data-driven decisions. Co-founded by Shailendra Tiwari (CEO) and Ananda Verma (CTO), the company has more than 160 employees, a presence across 12 districts in India and Southeast Asia, and has deployed over 6,000 IoT devices. The company intends to use new funds to expand operations domestically and internationally. Fasal also plans to diversify into new business streams including secondary processing of farm produce and Software as a Service (SaaS) intelligence. Fasal received an investment from Beyond Capital Ventures; the amount of the deal was not disclosed. Fasal is a precision horticulture company that combines AI, crop sciences and proprietary IoT-crop intelligence to deliver farm-level, crop-specific and crop-stage-specific insights. Its platform enables resource optimization (water, pesticides) and higher farm productivity while procuring high-quality, traceable produce for an end-to-end optimized value chain. Since commercializing its technology, Fasal has worked with horticulture farmers across more than 75,000+ acres on crops including grapes, pomegranates, bananas, apples, chili and cardamom. The company describes its IoT-crop intelligence as patented and operates a B2B brand, Fasal Fresh. It plans to use new funding to accelerate R&D, innovate its proprietary farm IoT-crop intelligence, and develop advanced cross-industry data products to foster a carbon-negative agriculture value chain. Fasal intends to expand the business in India, Southeast Asia and Africa. Fasal is a full-stack, artificial intelligence-powered IoT SaaS platform for progressive horticulture that uses on-farm sensors and scientific algorithms to deliver farm- and crop-specific actionable insights in vernacular languages. The company provides on-farm sensing and analytics to generate agronomy recommendations and monitoring for growers. Fasal is developing additional services including fruit and vegetable market linkages and parametric crop insurance. The platform reports saving more than 9 billion liters of irrigation water, reducing pesticide expenditure by about 60%, and increasing yields across more than 40,000 acres to date. Fasal plans to use its new funding to expand across India and Southeast Asia and to strengthen its full-stack services. The company also intends to ramp up hiring across sales and marketing, agronomy, and technology teams. Fasal, launched in 2018 by Ananda Prakash Verma and Shailendra Tiwari and operated by Wolkus Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd, is an AI-powered IoT‑SaaS platform for horticulture. It captures real-time data from a field sensor array that measures micro-climate, soil, and crop conditions and claims the array can be installed by farmers in less than 15 minutes. The platform translates that data into farm-specific, actionable advisories delivered via mobile in vernacular languages. Fasal says farmers have seen major increases in profitability and significant water savings after using its service, and the company aims to become a full‑stack platform for horticulture farmers. It is presently operating in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh and plans pan‑India expansion and entry into Southeast Asian markets. The recent funding will be used to build AI capabilities for each horticulture value chain and to launch a lower‑cost installable version of its field sensor array.

Participated · Equity · Jan 2023

Bloomfield Robotics is a Pittsburgh-based company that builds AI-driven plant imaging technology to deliver plant-level insights for specialty crops. Its stated mission is to make every farm vehicle a continuous data collection platform that assesses the health and performance of each plant. The company aims to help growers make more informed management decisions by providing actionable plant-level information. Bloomfield is pursuing strategic partnerships to broaden deployment and tailor analysis by crop and region. Following a reported $4.4 million funding raise, the company plans to grow its team, deploy the technology to more customers, and continue product development to serve the entire specialty crop supply chain. Institutional investments announced are intended to reinforce partnerships with leading players in Bloomfield's strategic markets. Bloomfield Robotics provides plant growth monitoring services targeted at tree crops. The company is described as US-based in the article. The December 9, 2021 report notes an investment by Kubota. The articles do not describe the company’s future plans or product roadmap. No revenue, user, or other operating metrics are disclosed in the article. Bloomfield Robotics, founded in 2019 as a Carnegie Mellon University spinout, develops the Bloomfield FLASH: a smart stereo-vision camera that emits its own flash, captures depth-aware, geolocated plant images from ATVs or tractors, and uploads them to the cloud for deep-learning analysis. The company’s AI evaluates plant size, fruit counts, cluster shape, leaf density, and signs of disease or infestation, producing virtual visual renderings and a recurring digital twin of fields. Bloomfield positions itself as crop-agnostic within specialty crops and currently operates in 15 vineyards across four countries plus one blueberry grower in Peru. The product aims to expand inspection coverage far beyond manual scouting, saving labor and enabling more efficient water and nutrient use. Since launch the company has driven early revenue while continuing product development and recently completed SVG Ventures’ THRIVE accelerator, winning the Innovation Icon Award. Management includes chief scientist George Kantor (CMU robotics) and CEO Mark DeSantis, and the company plans to remain based in Pittsburgh while hiring software engineers, plant scientists, and sales and marketing staff as it seeks another funding round.

Led · Seed · Nov 2022

Biotic produces bio-based alternatives to fossil-based plastics, manufacturing thermoplastic polymers that span applications from very flexible to very ruggedized products. Its process extracts the carbon source from macroalgae, a biomass grown in every ocean year-round. The company highlights environmental benefits from macroalgae in terms of CO2 impact, and says the feedstock is free of endotoxins and does not compete with arable land. Biotic uses saline water in its process, which it says reduces energy consumption and contamination risks. Led by CEO Adi Goldman, the company intends to use funding to build a plant, optimize processes, and increase production capacity. Financially, Biotic completed a €2M seed financing to support those plans.