RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – When AgBiome closed $65 million in Series C funding in July 2018, the company’s co-CEO Scott Uknes called the funding a “watershed moment.”
Now, the company has closed an additional funding round, with $117,179,074 in equity raised from 22 investors, according to the SEC filing.
WRAL TechWire reported in September 2021 that the firm had raised some $116 million in the oversubscribed round.
At the time, the company restated a goal of bringing 11 products to market by 2025.
“Biologicals are a rapidly growing, disruptive market segment that is projected to grow 14-fold by 2030,” said Scott Uknes, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of AgBiome in September 2021. “Growers need new tools to control problematic diseases while ensuring effective resistance management. AgBiome is laser focused on developing those science-based solutions. With this capital, AgBiome is well positioned to execute on its strategic business model focused on developing proprietary products, fostering partner programs, joint ventures, and new company formations, all of which represent significant growth opportunities for AgBiome.”
The company notes on its website that its microbial collection “is the invaluable heart of our platform. ”
The company isolates microbes from environmental samples and then sequences each microbes genome, the website describes.
RTP agtech startup AgBiome raises $116M in fight to feed world responsibly
Funding history
The company began to raise capital in November 2019, according to the company’s filing. According to the company’s website, there are three strategic investors: Leaps by Bayer, Novozymes, and Syngenta Ventures. The company’s existing investors also include Blue Horizon and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others, according to its website.
The company, which was spun out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013, also raised $34.5 million in 2015.
AgBiome announced new partnerships in 2021, including ones with BASF and Genective.
Also in 2021, Dr. Marijn Dekkers, a former CEO at Bayer AG and a former CEO at Thermo Fisher Scientific, became the chair of the company’s board of directors.
The company has more than a dozen open job roles, according to the firm’s careers website.
