Agrible, Inc.

Established: 2014
Location: Champaign, IL
Prior Round Funding: Series B

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Agrible sells software that connects the agricultural supply chain from field-to-market, providing critical sustainability,agronomic, and yield data.

AgriWebb Australia Pty Ltd

Established: 2013
Location: Sydney, -1
Prior Round Funding: Series C

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AgriWebb is building the digital backbone of the livestock industry, connecting animal and land management to the supply chain and the consumer.

Arable Labs, Inc.

Established: 2014
Location: San Francisco, CA
Prior Round Funding: Series C

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Arable, the leader in crop intelligence, advances digital agriculture globally. Forward-thinking agribusinesses, farming operations, and food and beverage companies use Arable to be more productive, sustainable, and profitable. Arable’s intuitive IoT-based solution combines reliable in-field weather, forecast, plant, soil, and irrigation data with advanced modeling and machine learning to deliver real-time, actionable insights into the entire crop system.

Artemis, Inc.

Established: 2015
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Prior Round Funding: Series B

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Artemis is a software company making indoor farming profitable, efficient and traceable, enabling growers to drive the indoor farming revolution.

Autonomous Pivot

Established: 2018
Location: Tel Aviv, AL
Prior Round Funding: Seed

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Autonomous Pivot turns center-pivot irrigation systems into a noninvasive soil/crop sensor and communications network. This network feeds an artificial intelligence decision support engine for autonomous irrigation, fertigation, and crop protection, which ultimately helps growers maximize yield and minimize inputs.

Benson Hill Inc.

Established: 2012
Location: St. Louis, MO
Prior Round Funding: Series D

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Benson Hill is a crop improvement company that taps the natural genetic diversity of plants to develop healthier and more sustainable food. CropOS combines machine learning and big data with genome editing and plant biology to differentiate and accelerate the product development process to modernize our food system.

Bond Pet Foods

Established: 0
Location: Boulder, CO
Prior Round Funding: Series A

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Bond Pet Foods, Inc (“Bond” or the “Company”) develops alternative protein pet foods. Their microbial fermentation process uses animal DNA to create animal proteins without slaughtering any animals. The Company is currently in the process of obtaining regulatory clearance for its novel meat proteins and plans to sell its products to ingredient and pet food suppliers as well as direct to consumers.

Bonumose

Established: 2016
Location: Charlottesville, VA
Prior Round Funding: Series C

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Bonumose is commercializing low-glycemic index, natural sugars through a proprietary, cost-effective enzymatic process.

Brightseed, Inc.

Established: 2017
Location: San Francisco, CA
Prior Round Funding: Series B

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Brightseed is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered nutrition discovery company that identifies unique micronutrients in the plant kingdom and maps them to specific human health conditions where they can have the highest impact.

Geltor, Inc.

Established: 2015
Location: San Leandro, CA
Prior Round Funding: Series C

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Geltor has a platform technology that enables it to cost effectively produce sustainable and beneficial proteins for the cosmetic, food, beverage, nutritional supplement, and healthcare industries.

GroundTruth Ag, Inc. dba EarthOptics

Established: 2018
Location: Blacksburg, VA
Prior Round Funding: Series A

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EarthOptics is building the technologies and data products that will allow for the accurate measurement and modeling of key soil attributes, enabling land managers to improve soil health and unlock the value of healthy soils.

Growers Edge Financial, Inc

Established: 2017
Location: Johnston, IA
Prior Round Funding: Series B

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Growers Edge offers warranty and lending products and services in the agtech marketplace. Their warranties help farmers by guaranteeing yield with the adoption of new technologies.

Harpe Bioherbicide Solutions, Inc.

Established: 2019
Location: Raleigh, NC
Prior Round Funding: Seed

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Harpe Bioherbicide Solutions, Inc. (“Harpe”) is an agtech company focused on providing natural and sustainable solutions to expand and provide new opportunities for organic agriculture while reducing, replacing, and synergizing with synthetic chemical use in row & specialty crops and commercial & consumer markets.

Harvest CROO, LLC

Established: 2012
Location: Plant City, FL
Prior Round Funding: Series B

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HarvestCROO is building the premier automation and robotics solution to solve the labor shortage crisis in specialty agriculture, starting with strawberries.

HerdDogg, Inc.

Established: 2015
Location: Longmont, CO
Prior Round Funding: Series A

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HerdDogg’s patented animal wearable technologies provide animal tracking and aid in the identification of missed heats, illness, and dystocia (difficult births) for the 2.5 billion herd animals worldwide.

Holganix, LLC

Established: 2010
Location: Glen Mills, PA
Prior Round Funding: Series C

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Holganix produces organic plant probiotics that make soils and plants healthier, more resilient, and more productive.

Kula Bio, Inc.

Established: 2018
Location: Somerville, MA
Prior Round Funding: Series A

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Kula Bio is an agriculture biotechnology company that aims to extend the life of microbes to unlock their biological potential and maximize their impact.

Kultevat, Inc.

Established: 2012
Location: St. Louis, MO
Prior Round Funding: Series B

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Kultevat combines genetic breeding and chemical process engineering to produce natural rubber from the Russian dandelion in North America.

Mercaris

Established: 2012
Location: Silver Spring, MD
Prior Round Funding: Series B

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Mercaris is a market data service and trading platform for organic, non-GMO, and other Identity Preserved (IP) agricultural commodities.

OneClickship, Inc.

Established: 2015
Location: Oakland, CA
Prior Round Funding: Series A

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TradeLanes offers a SaaS-based trade execution and automation platform that eliminates the manual tasks needed to ship ocean containers. Its interface accesses real-time data about shipments, destinations, and clients, TradeLanes simplifies the export/import process by driving efficiencies, improving visibility, and reducing errors in the process.

PatternAG

Established: 2018
Location: Emeryville, CA
Prior Round Funding: Series B

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PatternAg’s crop protection product delivers actionable intelligence to farmers, based on high resolution mapping of the DNA found in a farmer’s soil. With nearly 100 billion organisms per soil core, Pattern’s metagenomic DNA sequencing technology maps the unique microbial community found in a farmer’s field, identifying key opportunities to increase yield and save money. Armed with Pattern’s insights into next season’s risks, especially from the most costly pathogens like Corn Rootworm and Soybean Cyst Nematode, farmers can apply recommended protective measures to maximize their yield or save money on inputs when those risks are absent.

Plant Response, Inc.

Established: 2008
Location: Durham, NC
Prior Round Funding: Series B

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PlantResponse Biotech is a Raleigh, NC based company that is developing and commercializing biologically related products that improve plant health and protect yield potential.

Plastomics, Inc.

Established: 2016
Location: Saint Louis, MO
Prior Round Funding: Series A

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Plastomics has developed a proprietary genetic engineering model that can produce high performing crops through editing the chloroplast.

Pluton Biosciences, Inc.

Established: 2017
Location: Saint Louis, MO
Prior Round Funding: Series A

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Pluton Biosciences applies systems biology to global agriculture, combining the power of microbiomes and crop genetics with genomics, environmental, and synthetic biology to solve global threats to our climate and food.

ProteoSense LLC

Established: 2014
Location: Columbus, OH
Prior Round Funding: Seed

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ProteoSense is building a biosensing platform for rapid, cheap and highly sensitive food safety testing.

Sentera, Inc.

Established: 2014
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Prior Round Funding: Series C2

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Sentera is a UAV and crop analytics company delivering the most comprehensive suite of value-added hardware and software solutions available today to growers & agronomists.

Shellfish Solutions, Inc.

Established: 2018
Location: Castine, ME
Prior Round Funding: Seed

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BlueTrace – Why We Invested

At iSelect, we strive to invest in entrepreneurs and technologies that enable a food system that is productive, sustainable, nutritious, ethical and accessible. We are proud to support BlueTrace as they work to bring the seafood supply chain into the digital era, supporting a safer, more transparent and more profitable infrastructure for seafood producers, distributors, buyers and consumers.

Growing Pains: Growing Demands for Seafood & Aquaculture Amidst Major Challenges

Globally, seafood and aquaculture provides ~17% of protein consumption, representing hundreds of billions of dollars in market value and an estimated $1.8T in total supply chain value. Demand for seafood is expected to double by 2050 and in the past 60 years, total global seafood consumption has grown at twice the global population growth rate and is expected to increase substantially over the next decade. This is all with good reason – seafood represents not only an incredibly diverse and delicious set of food products, but also is largely regarded as a potent source of nutrition due to its high protein content, healthy fats, low calorie content and quantity of vitamins and minerals.

However, the seafood industry is under pressure to change, largely due to concerns around environmental sustainability and food safety.Today, 90% of global fish marine fish stocks are fully exploited or overfished and seafood is one of the most common vectors of food borne illness (source). 50% of seafood faces traceback failure (source?), which is a challenge to both goals from both food safety and sustainability perspectives. How can we build a safe and sustainable seafood supply chain if we don’t know where half of the supply is coming from?

The Potential for Traceability to Drive Change in the Seafood Market

While these challenges are significant, implementing traceability and bringing seafood production into the digital era has the potential to solve these challenges, while driving value for producers, distributors, buyers and consumers. According to PlanetTracker (Sept 2022), seafood traceability solutions could drive profit increases by up to 60% due to reduced food safety recalls, food waste, reduced staff and improved operational efficiency.

Further, US regulators are mandating digital traceability for seafood. In November 2022, the FDA came out with its final rules for the Food Safety Modernization Act which significantly strengthens food traceability requirements. Further, NOAA’s Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) establishes reporting and recordkeeping requirements for imports of thirteen seafood species groups, to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated-caught and/or misrepresented seafood from entering U.S. commerce. However, even with these regulations in place, 90% of seafood companies are non-compliant with these rules today (BlueTrace 2022).

Adoption of existing seafood traceability solutions have lagged because they are often too expensive and too cumbersome to use. Most users view traceability as a tax and not something that can drive value for them. BlueTrace has built a solution designed to make traceability simple, easy and impactful to seafood producers’ & distributors’ bottom line.

BlueTrace – Unlocking Traceability & Payments for Seafood, Starting with Shellfish

BlueTrace offers the leading traceability, tagging, and compliance platform designed for the seafood industry, starting with shellfish. BlueTrace’s mobile solutions enable organizations big and small to manage fast moving inventory, eliminate redundant data entry, streamline operations, and comply with evolving regulations.

BlueTrace started by solving a problem for shellfish farmers, back when the Company was called OysterTracker. Shellfish farmers were largely tracking their production via paper based systems, which are both cumbersome and challenging to keep track of. BlueTrace solves this with its tagging solution, which makes it easy for shellfish farmers to print and attach a tag to shellfish harvests prior to sale to distributors. This simple solution saves farmers a huge amount of time but creates a digital record that previously didn’t exist, leading to a world of possibilities. Today, BlueTrace serves seafood producers & distributors via its tagging solution, which will underpin its ability to expand into other digital products and services.

BlueTrace’s vision is to become the leading provider of solutions for digital traceability and payments in the seafood supply chain. The Company’s expansion plan is three-fold:

1. Build the leading seafood traceability solution in North America, starting in shellfish
2. Expand into payments, operations & marketing
3. Expand the solution globally

BlueTrace grew its business 200% between 2021 and 2022 to $1M in revenue with a majority of its focus on the North American shellfish market. With the proceeds from the Company’s $4.3M Seed Preferred Equity Financing, the Company plans to deepen its use case for non-shellfish species and add to its suite of digital offerings.

Why We’re Taking the Leap into Seafood

iSelect has been investing in companies that help bring visibility to the agrifood supply chain since 2016. iSelect portfolio companies like Agrible (acq. Nutrien), Vence (acq. Merck), Artemis, (acq. iUNU), Arable Labs, AgriWebb and Sentera allow producers, distributors, buyers and consumers to know more about where food comes from and how it is made. The $1.8T seafood industry faces many of the same challenges and in some instances is in even more desperate need for solutions. With that in mind, we are excited to welcome BlueTrace and their fantastic team to the iSelect Fund portfolio as our first investment in the seafood industry.

Stony Creek Colors, Inc.

Established: 2014
Location: Springfield, TN
Prior Round Funding: Series B

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Stony Creek Colors, Inc. produces eco-friendly, bio-based dyes for sale to premium denim and garment brands, as well as other consumer goods, to allow them to sell traceable and environmentally friendly products.

Tillable, Inc.

Established: 2016
Location: Chicago, IL
Prior Round Funding: Series A

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Tillable, Inc. is a digital agriculture real estate platform that allows farmers, landowners, sellers, and buyers to buy, sell, rent, manage, or finance farmland.

Vence, Corp.

Established: 2016
Location: San Diego, CA
Prior Round Funding: Series A

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Vence is a livestock data management and technology company that enables the scaling of the sustainable production of nutritious grass fed and pasture raised livestock. Its initial offering is solving the labor and capital intensive problem of fencing in pastured livestock management. The benefits to livestock management include improved control of animal movement, enhanced nutritional quality of animal products, reduced land degradation, improved soil health and sequestration of carbon in the soil.

Vestaron, Inc.

Established: 2005
Location: Kalamazoo, MI
Prior Round Funding: Series C

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Vestaron is developing new products in the crop protection industry that address the growing concerns of resistance, high costs of R&D, and safety/environmental externalities.

Vive Crop Protection, Inc.

Established: 2006
Location: Mississauga, CA
Prior Round Funding: Series C

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Vive Crop Protection is delivering precision chemistry crop protection and fertility products that can reduce the volume of chemistry applied, reduce application costs, improve yields and improve the viability of more sustainable inputs, like biologics.