February 22, 2016

Bio agtech firm, Indigo, formerly known as Symbiota, has announced on its website that it has raised $56 million led by Flagship Ventures.

The company, which was originally created within Flagship’s in-house incubator, VentureLabs, is working to answer the need of feeding a booming world population of 9.7 billion by 2050 through sustainable methods. Current agricultural methods including the use of ever-effective insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and fertilizers have increased agricultural output over time, but yields have plateaued in recent years, seeing average yield increases of just over one percent per year. In addition, these methods have disrupted the plant’s beneficial microorganisms, or microbiome, in the same way that science has learned that antibiotics can disrupt a human’s beneficial microbiome.

Indigo has compared modern seeds with wild ancestral varieties, stored seeds, and modern plants that demonstrate high levels of resistance and hardiness, finding a significant difference in microbe diversity.

Fortune reports that Indigo currently claims 40,000 microbial sequences, which according to David Perry, Indigo CEO, is the largest collection of live plant microbes. Using this base of data, Indigo has identified the specific plant microbes that increase output, particularly under environmental stress such as a lack of water, resulting in field trials that show a 10% increase in yield compared to an average yearly increase of 1% for traditional agricultural methods.

Although this technology has the potential for positive societal impact, it also holds great potential for economic profit, according to Indigo’s website, which explains that the four main crops of wheat, corn, soy, and cotton have a global production value of $600 billion. If factoring in a 10% increase in yield from Indigo’s technology, the economic impact could equal $60 billion.

Given the ongoing push-back against food technologies including genetically modified crops from many quarters, Perry explains to Fortune that “The average consumer really doesn’t like the idea of technology in food at all,” but notes that the processes that Indigo have developed will avoid such consumer response. “What we’re doing is what nature could have already done and humans have undone.”