Benson Hill Biosystems, a promising agricultural technology company that raised $60 million in capital Monday, could have been built in North Carolina instead of the St. Louis area.
Its co-founder and chief executive, Matthew Crisp, lived in the Raleigh area. That’s one corner of the famed Research Triangle, a magnet for innovative firms, but in 2013 Crisp agreed to base the company in Creve Coeur.
The location had two big attractions: the Danforth Plant Science Center, where co-founder Todd Mockler did the research on which Benson Hill’s gene editing platform is based, and money.
The money wasn’t a lot at first, but BioGenerator, which invests in early-stage life sciences companies here, agreed to provide seed funding.
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Dan Broderick, a BioGenerator vice president, had to increase that commitment about a year later when Benson Hill couldn’t pay its bills. “We stepped in two or three times to make payroll for the company, writing checks of $20,000 or $30,000,” he recalled.
Broderick was betting that the company would soon attract outside capital, and it did — first from other Midwestern investors, then from national funds and now from a truly big name. Monday’s $60 million round was led by GV, formerly known as Google Ventures.
GV is a subsidiary of Google’s parent, Alphabet. The funding, and the connections that come with it, should help Benson Hill improve its computational genomics platform, known as CropOS, and bring more enhanced crops to market.
“The folks at Google are data people,” says Carter Williams, CEO of iSelect Fund, an investor in Benson Hill. “This is validation that the agriculture market and genomics have become more about leveraging data.”
The investment is also validation for the St. Louis visionaries who created institutions like the Danforth Center, BioGenerator and the Helix Center, the business incubator where Benson Hill is located. GV’s 300-plus investments include high-profile technology companies like Uber and Slack. They also include a handful of other food and agriculture firms, but most are based in Silicon Valley or New York.
By bringing GV’s money and expertise to the heartland, Benson Hill should cement St. Louis’ reputation as a hotbed of ag innovation.
Andrew Smith, the St. Louis Regional Chamber’s vice president for entrepreneurship, estimates that the region attracted about 4 percent of the venture capital industry’s agriculture investments last year. That’s a lot: It’s comparable to the percentage of technology investments going to New York.
“We have a strong claim to being the global epicenter for ag-tech investment, and this is going to be a tremendous boost to our brand,” Smith said of the GV investment.
Crisp said Benson Hill expects to add 20 to 30 jobs within a year to the 75 or so it has here now. The company recently finished moving its back-office functions to Creve Coeur from North Carolina, and St. Louis County officials are planning to expand the Helix Center to accommodate its growth.
Broderick figures the presence of a high-profile investor will help other local entrepreneurs too: When GV officials visit St. Louis to keep tabs on their Benson Hill investment, they’ll hear about and meet the other promising agriculture startups that have sprung up near the Danforth Center.
Those checks BioGenerator wrote to Benson Hill in 2013 and 2014 may not have seemed big at the time, but they loom large now. Without them, one of St. Louis’ most promising companies wouldn’t be here to bring the biggest of big-name investors to town.