The Company Files◆
Ag Biotech◆
Foster City, CA◆
Est. 2017
Soil Intelligence, As A Service
Solena
The ag biotech company that reads your dirt's DNA and hands back a prescription instead of a guess.
The ag biotech company that reads your dirt's DNA and hands back a prescription instead of a guess.
Here is a thing about agriculture that sounds made up but isn't: farmers spend enormous sums on what goes onto the soil - nitrogen, fungicide, inoculants, the whole chemical shopping list - and almost nothing understanding what actually lives in it. The top six inches of a field is, biologically, one of the busiest places on the planet. A single teaspoon can hold more microorganisms than there are people on Earth. And for most of farming history, that entire teeming factory has been treated like inert gravel.
Solena's pitch is that this is a mistake, and a fixable one. The company sequences the DNA of the microbes in a soil sample the way a lab sequences a blood panel, scores the result, and turns that score into instructions. You mail in dirt; you get back a prescription. The interesting part is not that this is possible - genomics has been getting cheaper for two decades - but that Solena has built an actual business around the boring, repeatable act of measuring the thing everyone else ignored.
The mechanism has a name, Prometheus, which is the sort of name you pick when you want people to know you take yourselves seriously. It is a data-mining platform and a growing biorepository - a library of soil microbiomes - that converts metagenomic, environmental, and agronomic data into a molecular diagnosis. Out the other end comes a recommendation: which biological inputs, in what amounts, for this specific field. The company's tagline, "boost your biological capital," is doing real work here. It is asking farmers to treat soil biology as an asset on the balance sheet rather than a cost of doing business.
There is a reason this is a company and not a science project. Soil testing is inherently recurring - you sample before the season, you sample after the harvest, you track whether the number moved. That is a subscription, whether or not anyone calls it one. Add an API that plugs into John Deere and Trimble equipment, add crop financing to help growers actually adopt the recommendations, and you have something that looks less like a lab and more like infrastructure.
Whether Solena becomes the reference lab for regenerative farming or one of several credible players sorting out a young market is, at this stage, genuinely unsettled. But the underlying wager is clean and testable: soil health is measurable, measurement changes behavior, and changed behavior shows up in the harvest. Everything Solena builds is a bet on that sentence being true.
You mail in dirt; you get back a prescription. The clever part isn't that it's possible - it's that someone built a business on measuring the thing everyone ignored.
Regenerative agriculture has always had a credibility problem - how do you prove the soil got better? Solena's answer is the Metagenome Index for Soil Sustainability, a single score that folds together two things farmers can otherwise only guess at: how healthy the microbial community is, and how much sustainability potential the soil is carrying. What gets measured gets managed. What gets managed on a farm eventually shows up at harvest.
Sequence the microbiome from a soil sample and get the MISS score - microbial health plus sustainability potential, in a number you can track season over season.
The platform reads your soil, climate, and crop needs, then spells out what to apply, when, and how much - aimed at cutting synthetic inputs while protecting yield.
Spot soil pathogens before they spread and before a crop looks sick - the point at which the loss is usually already baked in.
Pipe soil-biology data into GIS, IoT, drones, and equipment from John Deere and Trimble, so the field machinery acts on what the microbes are saying.
Repeat scans build a genomic paper trail of soil improvement - the kind of evidence carbon credits and regenerative certifications are supposed to represent.
Financing services help growers actually put the prescription into the ground rather than filing it away for next year.
Boost your biological capital.
A biotechnologist by training, Rivera founded Solena in 2017 on the wager that soil is agriculture's most under-measured asset. He was named to Forbes Mexico's list of promising entrepreneurs (2019) and MIT's Innovators Under 35 LATAM (2020) in the Inventors category.
Co-developed the core methodology behind Solena's approach to reading and scoring the soil microbiome - the science that Prometheus and the MISS index are built on.
Investors: CerraCap Ventures and The Yield Lab Latam anchored the round, with earlier support from the Illumina Accelerator - a genomics-focused program whose backing fits a company whose whole product runs on sequencing. Estimated annual revenue sits around $1.7M, consistent with a company still early in scaling a recurring soil-testing model.
Funding figures reflect publicly reported totals; revenue is an external estimate and should be treated as approximate.
Irving Rivera launches the company to study the microbiome of agricultural soils, with methodology co-created by Octavio Gonzalez.
Solena builds its data-mining platform and biorepository to convert soil DNA into diagnosis and recommendations.
CerraCap Ventures announces its investment; the MISS soil-health index anchors the product.
The Yield Lab Latam joins the investor group as Solena closes its Series A round in October.
Solena joins NVIDIA Inception, pitches at St. Louis high-tech farm events, and partners with Greencorp on customized plant treatments.
The data platform is named Prometheus, after the Titan who stole fire for humanity. Solena's version steals insight from soil DNA - slightly less dramatic, considerably more scalable.
A teaspoon of healthy soil can contain more microorganisms than there are people on Earth. That teaspoon is, more or less, Solena's entire raw material.
The logo is a leaf folded into the shape of a water drop - the two invisible variables every grower is quietly betting on.
Solena's products carry COFEPRIS certification, OMRI listing, and CCOF approval, with FAO affiliation - the regulatory alphabet soup of serious ag inputs.
Solena sequences the microbiome of a farm's soil, scores its biological health with the MISS index, and uses its Prometheus platform to generate AI-driven prescriptions for reducing inputs and improving soil health.
Solena was founded in 2017 by biotechnologist Irving Rivera (CEO), with methodology co-developed by Octavio Gonzalez. It is headquartered in Foster City, California, with operations in Mexico.
Solena raised a $6M Series A (October 2023) with investors including CerraCap Ventures and The Yield Lab Latam, plus earlier support from the Illumina Accelerator.
MISS stands for Metagenome Index for Soil Sustainability - a single score combining microbial health and sustainability potential, derived from DNA analysis of a soil sample.
By documenting soil biology through repeat genomic scans, Solena gives farmers measurable evidence of soil improvement - helping them qualify for carbon and regenerative incentives while cutting synthetic inputs.
Sources: solena.ag (Home, About, Solutions, MISS, Press), Crunchbase, PR Newswire, CerraCap Ventures, Global Ag Tech Initiative, The Yield Lab Latam / Contxto, GlobeNewswire, Tracxn. Details verifiable from public sources as of July 2026; revenue and some figures are approximate.