CAMBRIDGE, Mass.– Robigo, a company that biomanufactures precision crop protection solutions, announced today that it has raised $6.85 million in Seed funding led by early stage climate tech fund, Congruent Ventures, with participation from other deep technology investors, including Good Growth Capital and First Star Ventures, amongst others.
Increasing plant disease outbreaks contribute to an estimated global crop loss of 20 – 40%, and newly emerging diseases lack timely, effective treatments to mitigate their spread. Robigo seeks to answer the agricultural industry’s call for faster, greener solutions that better protect crops. Applying a deep expertise in biological engineering and data science, Robigo’s scalable platform technology precisely targets agricultural diseases while being safe to beneficial microbes, insect pollinators, human consumers, and the environment. Robigo is focusing initially on developing technologies to address devastating diseases that impact high value specialty crops for which there are few effective commercial treatments.
Building off laboratory plant data demonstrating over 90% reduction of diseases in multiple crops, Robigo will use the investment to demonstrate product efficacy in outdoor field environments. “Today, the most widely used pesticides are toxic to the soil, broader environment, and human consumers in large part because they kill indiscriminately,” said Robigo’s CEO, Dr. Andee Wallace. “We’ve developed a way to give naturally-occurring microbes a boost that enables them to protect crops from disease. The next step is showing growers that it works reliably in the field, season after season.”
Beyond demonstrating efficacy in the field, Robigo will be expanding its platform capabilities to address a broader range of crops and diseases. Wallace added, “We’ve put together a world class team and we’re committed to growing our impact across the industry by delivering new solutions for the most hard-to-treat diseases.”
For investor Joshua Posamentier, managing partner at Congruent Ventures, it’s the broader impacts of Robigo’s technology on the agricultural sector that motivated him to back Robigo. “Agriculture has an outsized impact on the planet – from contributing 11% of greenhouse gas emissions to causing a significant loss in biodiversity. Robigo’s platform has far reaching potential to fundamentally change how growers treat their crops, by eliminating the chemical products we’ve become accustomed to with safer biological solutions.”
Posamentier isn’t the first to see the limitless potential of biomanufacturing in agriculture, and the past two years have offered a few notable highlights, such as Pivot Bio’s $430M Series D, Greenlight Biosciences IPO, and Corteva’s $1.2B acquisition of Stoller.
