InnerPlant, a company that develops living plant sensors, today announces its successful $5.65 M seed + pre-seed funding led by MS&AD Ventures, the investment arm of the Japanese insurance titan MS&AD Insurance Group, with participation from Bee Partners, Up West, and TAU Ventures. The investment opens the way to developing new products using data directly from plants for crop risk management and food supply chains.
“The rapidly changing conditions facing the farming industry create a risk environment that is hard to track,” explains Jon Soberg, MS&AD Ventures’ Managing Partner. “InnerPlant’s unique living sensors and associated data platform provide a unique solution that allows farmers to use land more fruitfully and this aligns with our mission to build a sustainable future. We believe that the insights from InnerPlant will help us to better manage the entire food supply chain.”
The team with InnerPlant reviewing crop data
InnerPlant was founded in 2018 with the vision of revolutionizing farming for a growing planet by developing genetically adapted living sensors that help farmers grow plants more sustainably, cutting their reliance on pesticides and fertilizer.
Crop needs
Farmers routinely see up to 20% of their harvests destroyed by pathogens that could have been controlled with earlier detection and more responsive, plant-specific interventions. InnerPlant’s approach to collecting data directly from plants and its use of advanced algorithms to process the data provides plant-by-plant status that’s impractical using external sensors.
“Enabling crops to express their needs finally brings the data revolution to the farmer’s field in a way that fits with how they’re already working,” says Shely Aronov, CEO and founder of InnerPlant. “Rather than installing hardware across fields, farmers continue planting crops the way they always have and our platform pulls data directly from individual plants to provide farmers with insight into stresses so resources like pesticides and fertilizers are used only when needed.”
InnerPlant delivers this unprecedented flow of data by tapping plants’ natural defenses. Plants have evolved sophisticated defense mechanisms to protect themselves from environmental stresses. InnerPlant piggybacks on these signals by adding a safe protein, long studied for human consumption, to plants’ capabilities. When plants are thirsty, short of nutrients, or under attack by pests or fungi, they generate different optical signals that can be seen in daylight using common optical filters on devices ranging from an iPhone or tractor to a satellite.
For more information:
InnerPlant
Press@innerplant.com
www.innerplant.com