Connecting Innovators, Investors, Industry Professionals and Early Adopter Customers

From improvements in nutritional value, to better resource efficiency, to improved yield, to better cost controls, the agriculture industry is ripe for disruption. It’s happening already, with harvesting automation systems, sensor-based farm management tools and other advanced technologies already appearing on the modern farm. iSelect is investing in the entrepreneurs who are making these innovations happen.

Gone are the days when big, industry-shaping innovations came out of corporate R&D departments. With the recent mega-mergers in agriculture, the market has changed to allow entrepreneurship to set the pace for food and agricultural innovation.

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“Given the overall AgTech entrepreneurial activity in the region, and the large number of multinational players, the American Heartland can be a powerful influence in driving the objectives of the AgTech revolution. Taken together, these resources indicate a regional competitive advantage in AgTech, similar to what the Silicon Valley cluster has provided for the IT industry.”

“AgTech: Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainable Growth”, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, April 2014

iSelect Portfolio Companies

iSelect focuses on early-stage food and agriculture companies that are poised to help push the next agricultural revolution forward. We deliberately invest in companies that can make a positive impact on our society, as well as on the bottom line.

Harvest CROO has developed a robotic strawberry harvester designed to solve the labor crisis in specialty agriculture. The Company designs and delivers robotic harvesters via a service model that combines advanced robotics, computer vision and machine learning to inspect, pick and pack specialty produce at equal to or greater than the speed and accuracy of human picking crews.
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Geltor, Inc. designs recombinant proteins that are produced by its proprietary cellular factories in bulk and at low cost for consumer and technical products. Using its platform technology, Geltor can quickly and inexpensively manufacture proteins for a wide range of industrial customers. Geltor’s first product, N-CollageTM, is synthetic collagen sold to brands and ingredient manufacturers in the cosmetics and personal care (C&PC) industry.
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Series Seed Extension
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Bonumose is commercializing low-glycemic index, natural sugars through a proprietary, cost-effective process. Due to public health issues connected to obesity and diabetes, consumer packaged goods firms are reducing traditional, added sugars and ramping their search for alternative sweeteners. The global market for food sweeteners is estimated to reach nearly $111.0 billion by 2020, of which traditional sugars hold an 80% market share. According to estimates, alternative sweeteners have the potential to replace between 2% and 25% of sugar. However, expensive production processes, bitter taste profiles, and poor food functionality, have stymied the growth of alternative sweeteners. Bonumose uses a proprietary enzymatic process to cost effectively convert commodity, agricultural feedstocks (e.g., corn or potato starch) into beneficial, natural sugars with taste and food functionality profiles like those of sucrose.
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Agrilyst, Inc. is a SaaS platform that tracks and analyzes farm data, helping indoor farms optimize plant performance and reduce operating expenses. From 2016 to 2023, the global indoor farming market is projected to grow at a 24% CAGR, reaching $6.4 billion in size by 2023 . On average, profitable indoor farms have been operating for at least 7 years . This is driven largely by an inability to understand, measure, and monitor the key cost drivers of production. Agrilyst’s SaaS system allows indoor farmers of all sizes to focus on the linkage all the way from sales forecasting to production planning, enabling them to reduce costs and increase profitability.
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Agrible sells software that connects the agricultural supply chain from field-to-market, providing critical sustainability, agronomic, and yield data. In an era when consumers demand to know what is grown (e.g., GMO vs non-GMO) and how it is grown (e.g., sustainable, organic, etc.), Agrible is the only solution that provides verifiable visibility from what goes in the ground to what goes in the package, with implications on how agricultural products are grown, traded, transported, processed, and labeled.
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ProteoSense is commercializing a proprietary biosensor for food safety testing. Current tests require expensive, specialized equipment and personnel, take anywhere from 12-hours to days, and often require food to be placed on hold until results are available. ProteoSense’s high-sensitivity, portable system detects foodborne pathogens in less than 2-hours, reducing test time from days to minutes, an important distinction for perishable foods with a limited shelf life.
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Benson Hill Biosystems, Inc. is a crop design platform that taps the natural genetic diversity of plants to develop healthier, more sustainable and higher yielding food choices. Using its cloud biology computational platform CropOS™, Benson Hill evaluates millions of genetic options, identifying those that optimize traits such as crop yield, nutritional value and resource efficiency with 10X the predictive value of standard methods. The Company then uses plant breeding, transgenics and/or genome editing, including proprietary, patented CRISPR methods, to develop seeds for planting – all in half the time and cost of conventional methods. Benson Hill has made the platform available to partners for use across a broad spectrum of applications from breeding to genome editing to transgenics. Breed, powered by CropOS™, provides decision support that can reduce typical breeding cycles by up to 50%. Edit, powered by CropOS™, which launched in 2017, enhances target selection and optimizes design of genome editing approaches.
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Holganix produces and sells 100% organic plant probiotics that significantly reduce the need for fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides and water while improving plant vibrancy and yield.
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Kultevat, Inc., based in St. Louis, MO, combines genetic breeding and chemical process engineering to produce natural rubber from Russian dandelions. There is a strong need to develop a domestic source of natural rubber. Russian dandelions can be grown across wide swaths of the U.S., and produce rubber that matches the characteristics of rubber derived from rubber trees.
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Meet Our Selection Committee

Our Food and Agriculture Selection Committee consists of industry and subject matter experts who help guide iSelect’s investment decisions. With firsthand experience and a true pulse on the industry, we consider these individuals key to our success in finding and investing in food and ag innovation.

Bill Northcott is the Chief Innovation Officer at Agrible. He works on developing and researching the science and feasibility of new products. Bill is a sixth generation farmer and currently manages a 500 acre corn/soybean operation in East Central Ill …

Connecting Innovators, Investors, Industry Professionals and Early Adopter Customers

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