March 29, 2019

TerViva, a firm developing and commercializing high-protein, high-volume pongamia trees, has raised $20 million through a Series D led by agricultural family office Evans Properties, and the Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Environmental Trust, and a collective of Florida-based agricultural family offices. They join existing investors: the Elemental Excelerator, the Yield Lab, Astia Angels, Allotrope Ventures, and Howard Fischer of Gratitude Railroad.  This round brings TerViva’s total capital raised to $40 million.

Pongamia trees produce a legume related to lentils, pea, and beans, and has been harvested for medicinal uses for more than 1,000 years. TerViva is the first company to make the protein and vegetable oils derived from the pongamia accessible for food applications. Once planted, the pongamia tree will begin to flower around year three or four, will be ready for commercial harvest around year five, and will have a productive lifespan of about 50 years.

As a plant-based protein, pongamia holds potential to be a replacement for soy, with six times the yield of soybeans and strong gelling and emulsification properties, and its oil is similar to high-oleic acid vegetable oils. When ready, harvesting is carried out with mechanical tree shakers, and processing is done with peanut shellers and soybean crushers, making it a low CAPEX activity.

Founded in 2010, TerViva provides patented, non-GMO,  high-yielding trees and offers proprietary bean processing to produce sustainable food and fuel. The company has conducted studies that show promising potential for pongamia protein to be utilized as an animal feed ingredient in poultry and bovine rations, and is preparing for regulatory submissions to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Through its business, TerViva sells its patented cultivars selected for their hardiness and superior yields to farmers who partner with the company to grow pongamia on fallow agricultural land using little to no fertilizers or pesticides. TerViva then buys back the crops for processing for its protein in livestock feed, and high-oleic oil, removing compounds that impact taste.

“Consumption of plant-based proteins and oils is growing rapidly, but the amount of arable land to grow these crops is increasingly limited,” said Naveen Sikka, founder and CEO of TerViva. “We’ve developed a sustainable, market-driven approach for farmers to profit off marginal land by cultivating trees that can feed the planet. We look forward to building partnerships that will incorporate our supply of highly-sustainable pongamia protein and oil as food and feed ingredients.”

TerViva began trial plantings of its patented pongamia trees on farmland in Florida in 2012 – where alternative crops are welcome as the citrus industry has been significantly negatively impacted by citrus greening disease – and on former sugarcane land in Hawaii on Oahu, Kauai, and Maui, where the last sugarcane harvest occurred in 2016.

All told, TerViva has 150,000 trees under contract with existing customers, and with the capital raised through this round, will be able to deliver an additional 200,000 trees over the next two years.

The company also plans to use the funding to support deeper research into the functional properties of the pongamia bean; to establish critical processing and product development partnerships that will reflect the commercial potential of pongamia protein and oil; and to build out TerViva’s infrastructure to make the company better able to supply their trees to farmers across Florida and Hawaii.

“TerViva will invest this Series D fundraising support alongside Florida’s citrus growers eager to revitalize fallow acreage and scale-up a sustainable, transparent oilseed supply chain,” said Ron Edwdards, chairman of TerViva, and president and CEO of Evans Properties Inc., former COO of Tropicana, and co-founder of SoBe Beverages, and Blue Buffalo Pet Food.  “This will unlock numerous applications of the company’s intellectual property growing high-performing trees and processing beans in to nutritious food and feed products to meet a broad range of needs.”

-Lynda Kiernan