June 23, 2021

By Lynda Kiernan-Stone, Global AgInvesting Media

InnerPlant, a company pioneering the development of genetically adapted living plant sensors, has closed on $5.6 million in pre-Seed funding led by MS&AD Ventures, the investment arm of Japanese insurance giant MS&AD Insurance Group. 

This round marks one of the first strategic investments made by a top insurance name in the agtech field. Other participants in the round included Bee Partners, Up West, and TAU Ventures. 

Farmers face a myriad of challenges. One of the harshest is the loss of nearly 20 percent of their harvests to pathogens that could have been controlled with earlier detection and more responsive, plant-specific solutions. Without early detection, farmers are reduced to prophylactic pesticide use, resulting in unpredictable crop yields, volatility within the supply chain, and uncertainty for service providers like insurers who provide risk mitigation.

But what if plants could “talk” to farmers, letting them know something is not right, or needs attention?

“The rapidly changing conditions facing the farming industry create a risk environment that is hard to track,” said Jon Soberg, managing partner, MS&AD Ventures. “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.”

Over millennia, plants have developed sophisticated means of communicating and protecting themselves and each other from environmental stressors. Building upon the natural signals that plants emit when under stress, InnerPlant has the ability to change a plant’s DNA to include a safe-for-human-consumption protein that makes the leave of a plant luminescent, with different colored leaves indicating different issues – such as pest infestation, lack of moisture, lack of nutrients, or disease.

Invisible to the human eye, these changes in plant leaves can be detected by farmers using InnerPlant’s augmented optical filter technology through an overhead drone, satellite, or simply from their tractor by photographing a field using an iPhone or iPad.

An entire field requires only a handful of these sensor plants to fully convey issues to farmers a full two weeks before human detection or other technologies currently in use.

“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,” said Shely Aronov, CEO and founder, 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.”

Despite the pandemic, the past year has been one of growth for the company, which expanded its team by four to a total of 14, with expectations of adding another two team members this year; closing on a laboratory space in Davis, California to build a greenhouse; being granted its first patent (with a second being secured soon), and the debut of its first product – the InnerTomato.

Work is also currently underway to expand its technology into other crops such as InnerSoy and InnerCotton.

“The tomatoes are proof-of-concept plants, but in the commercial market soybeans and cotton have a bigger scale — there are more acres to transform, and as a result, more impact,” Aronov told CrunchBase. “We plan to provide seed technology within the seeds and hope to have something there soon. We are also starting to work with farmers and get them on board with this process so they can give feedback.”

– Lynda Kiernan-Stone is editor with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, as well as HighQuest Group’s Oilseed & Grain News. She can be reached at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.com.