Kula Bio is a Massachusetts climate-tech company turning naturally occurring nitrogen-fixing microbes into living fertilizer factories that run inside the soil. Born from Harvard chemist Dan Nocera's 'bionic leaf' research, the company supercharges Xanthobacter autotrophicus with a renewable-energy carbon source so the bacteria deliver plant-available nitrogen at the root zone, on demand. Field trials show its flagship Kula-N can replace as much as 80% of a farm's synthetic nitrogen use without the runoff or the fossil-fuel footprint of conventional fertilizer.
Barclay Rogers is the co-founder and CEO of Graphyte, a carbon removal company that turns waste biomass into dense, dehydrated carbon blocks and buries them to keep CO2 out of the atmosphere for over a thousand years. A former environmental lawyer and mechanical engineer turned multi-time agtech and climate founder, he built Graphyte's 'Carbon Casting' process to deliver durable carbon removal at under $100 a ton, an order of magnitude cheaper than direct air capture. The company is backed by Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures and runs its first commercial plant in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Rogers also teaches a climate change solutions course as an adjunct professor of law at Tulane University.
Meiogenix is a French-American agricultural biotech company that re-engineers one of nature's oldest tricks - meiotic recombination, the gene-shuffling that happens when plants make seeds. Instead of editing single genes like CRISPR, its proprietary SpiX and dCas9-SPO11 platforms steer where chromosomes cross over, unlocking 'cold' regions of the genome that conventional breeding can never reach. The result: breeders can mix desirable traits, break unwanted linkage, and shrink crop development cycles from 10-plus years to as few as three, all without introducing foreign DNA. Founded in 2010 as a spin-off from Institut Curie and INRA, the company targets the $50B+ commercial seed market across corn, wheat, rice, tomato and soybean, and licenses its technology to partners including Bayer.
Moleaer is a California-based cleantech company that pioneered the industrial-scale production of nanobubbles - gas bubbles roughly 2,500 times smaller than a grain of salt. Its patented nanobubble generators inject oxygen and other gases into water with extreme efficiency, helping farms, fish operations, wastewater plants, lakes and industrial sites use less water, fewer chemicals and less energy. Founded in 2016 and led by CEO Nick Dyner, Moleaer has deployed thousands of systems across more than 55 countries and raised about $61 million through a 2022 Series C led by Apollo funds, followed by a 2025 global partnership and strategic investment from water-tech giant Xylem.
NuCicer is a Davis, California agtech and food-tech company breeding a new generation of high-protein chickpeas. Spun out of UC Davis and built on the largest pool of chickpea genetic diversity on earth, the company uses predictive (precision) breeding and genomics to develop chickpea varieties with up to 75% more protein than conventional beans - alongside better flavor, lower fat, and higher fiber. NuCicer sells whole beans, functional flours, protein powders, and bespoke trait packages to food brands seeking minimally processed, sustainable plant-protein ingredients that out-compete soy and pea isolates on taste and texture.
Oishii is an American vertical farming company that grows premium, pesticide-free, Non-GMO strawberries indoors year-round. Founded in 2016 by Hiroki Koga and Brendan Somerville, it recreates the climate of Japan's strawberry-growing regions inside automated 'Smart Farms' to produce its flagship Omakase Berry, the Koyo Berry, the Nikko Berry, and the Rubi Tomato. Headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey, Oishii operates what it calls the world's largest indoor vertical strawberry farm and sells through Whole Foods and direct delivery across the Northeast and beyond.
Devin Lammers is the CEO of TerraClear, the Issaquah, Washington agtech company building AI and robotics to pull rocks out of farm fields - and, increasingly, to scout entire fields for weeds, crop health, and more. He took the helm in August 2024 after seven years at Farmers Business Network, where he founded FBN Financial and Gradable and served as CRO/COO and interim CEO across a network of 50,000-plus members. A multi-generational South Dakota farm-and-ranch kid with a Dartmouth degree and an MIT Sloan MBA, he frames agtech as 'the intersection of technology meeting the physical world' and is steering TerraClear from a single hated chore toward a full-field autonomous intelligence platform.
Hiroki Koga is the co-founder and CEO of Oishii, the New Jersey company that grows the Omakase Berry inside the world's largest indoor vertical strawberry farm. A Tokyo native who watched Japan's vertical-farming boom collapse a decade before he built his own, Koga bet on a fruit nobody else would touch - strawberries - because they were the hardest crop to grow at scale and the only one with the economics to matter. By recreating the climate of the Japanese Alps indoors and getting bees to pollinate at over 90% success, Oishii became the only player to produce pollinated fruit commercially, pesticide-free and year-round.
TerraClear builds AI-powered machines that take one of farming's oldest, most miserable chores - picking rocks out of fields - and make it fast, precise, and increasingly autonomous. Founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneur and farm-raised Brent Frei, the Issaquah, Washington company pairs drone-based mapping, machine vision, and a robotic rock picker that clears hundreds of rocks an hour. In 2026 it launched TerraScout, a fully autonomous field-scouting robot that scans up to 1,000 acres a day for rocks, weeds, and more, turning images into real-time prescriptions for existing farm crews and equipment.
Kathryn Cook is the CEO and co-founder of NuCicer, a Davis, California agtech and food-tech company breeding chickpeas with up to 75% more protein than ordinary varieties. A former Boeing materials engineer and Facebook technical program manager, she left big tech to commercialize 35 years of her father's chickpea genetics research at UC Davis, applying machine learning and data analytics to plant breeding. NuCicer has raised roughly $23 million in total funding, planted across multiple US states, and aims to cut the cost of plant protein in half.
Kurt Tsuo is the Chief Business Officer of Varaha, a Gurugram-based carbon removal company building high-integrity credits with smallholder farmers across Asia and Africa. A Harvard-trained economist who spent seven years in agriculture before it was a climate headline, he has built business lines at the Gates Foundation, Farmer's Business Network, ProducePay, and Breakthrough Energy, and co-founded the carbon storage startup Graphyte. His through-line is unglamorous and stubborn: make the economics of fixing carbon work for the people who actually grow food.
Nicholas Dyner is the CEO of Moleaer Inc., the Hawthorne, California company that turned nanobubbles - gas bubbles 2,500 times smaller than a grain of salt - into an industrial-scale tool for growing more food, cleaning more water, and reviving dying lakes. A Cornell history-and-economics major who fell into the water industry through a GE leadership program and never left, Dyner has spent nearly two decades selling water-treatment technology in more than 90 countries. Since 2017 he has guided Moleaer from a wastewater experiment to over 10,000 installations across 55 countries, a partnership with Xylem, and a multi-billion-dollar category that barely existed before he showed up.
Rian Mc Donnell is the founder and CEO of FloVision Solutions, an AI company putting cameras and sensors on meat-processing lines so beef and poultry plants can see exactly where yield and quality slip away. He grew up around beef processing in rural Ireland, studied mechanical and manufacturing engineering at Trinity College Dublin (with a year at UC Berkeley), and built the company out of a Trinity student project before moving it to the United States via Notre Dame's ESTEEM program and SOSV's IndieBio. Now headquartered in South Bend, Indiana, FloVision has analyzed more than 23 million kilograms of food and raised an $8.7M Series A led by Insight Partners in 2025.
Ricardo Garcia de Alba is the President and CEO of Meiogenix, an agriculture biotech company whose chromosome-editing platform speeds up the way crops naturally reshuffle their own DNA. A chemical engineer from Mexico City turned global ag executive, he spent 15 years at Corteva Agriscience helping build and launch the Enlist weed-control system before taking the helm at Meiogenix in 2024. He pairs hard science and commercial scale with a long habit of community and STEM service - and keeps bees on the side.
Vishnu Jayaprakash is the CEO and co-founder of AgZen, an MIT spinout that puts cameras and AI on crop sprayers so farmers can see, for the first time, where their pesticide droplets actually land. He grew up spraying rice and mangoes by hand on his family's farm near Chennai, spent more than a decade at MIT studying how droplets cling to leaves, and turned that physics into a business that went from zero paid acres to nearly a million in two years. His pitch is blunt: agriculture has sprayed at scale for 80 years without ever measuring whether the chemical reached the plant.
Andes is a climate-tech and agricultural biotechnology company using beneficial soil microbes - applied as a seed coating on corn, soybean, canola and wheat - to convert atmospheric CO2 into stable soil inorganic carbon. Founded in 2016 by Gonzalo Fuenzalida and Tania Timmermann and headquartered in Alameda, California, Andes pairs microbial biology with field-scale measurement to deliver permanent, low-cost carbon removal across millions of acres of working farmland.
Chris Abbott is the Chief Executive Officer of Pivot Bio, a Berkeley-based agricultural biotechnology company pioneering microbial nitrogen solutions that replace synthetic fertilizers. A Minnesota native and University of Minnesota graduate, Abbott built his career at the intersection of agriculture finance and agtech investing - from Wall Street sell-side research at Piper Jaffray to co-leading Continental Grain's Conti Ventures. He joined Pivot Bio's board in 2018, and in August 2023 stepped up as CEO, guiding the company past $100 million in annual revenue while scaling its gene-edited microbes to over 5 million acres. Under his leadership, Pivot Bio achieved 60% year-over-year revenue growth and has helped farmers reduce synthetic nitrogen use by over 129,000 metric tons.
Gonzalo Fuenzalida-Meriz is a Chilean-born entrepreneur and CEO & Co-Founder of Andes, a California-based climate tech company that deploys beneficial soil microbes via seed coatings to permanently lock atmospheric CO2 into soil minerals. A former investment banker turned biotech founder, he led development of the world's first Microbial Carbon Mineralization (MCM) Methodology — validated under ISO 14064 — and has raised $41M+ to scale a platform that simultaneously improves farm yields and generates durable carbon credits.
Pivot Bio engineers nitrogen-fixing microbes that live on crop roots and feed corn, wheat, sorghum and small grains directly, replacing a portion of synthetic fertilizer with a biological alternative that does not volatilize into the atmosphere or leach into groundwater.
Bonsai Robotics is a San Jose-based agricultural autonomy company that builds vision-first AI systems for off-road farm equipment. Founded in 2022 by veterans of Blue River Technology and John Deere, the company's Intelligence Platform combines embedded autonomy software with retrofittable hardware kits to let existing and new farm machinery operate with minimal human input - even in GPS-denied fields, at night, and in heavy dust. With $28.5M raised and its July 2025 acquisition of farm-ng, Bonsai is expanding from specialty-crop orchards into bedded-crop row farming and modular electric robot platforms.
Calyx (formerly BioInspira) is a Berkeley-based agtech company that combines AI-powered computer vision with proprietary phage-based biosensors to help poultry farmers monitor flock weight, environmental conditions, and gas levels in real time. Founded in 2014 by UC Berkeley bioengineering alumni, the company's platform integrates overhead cameras, multi-gas sensors, and cloud analytics to give broiler producers continuous, data-driven visibility into flock health and harvest timing — with 98.4% accuracy in predicting chicken weight across more than 17 million validated birds.
Ceres AI (formerly Ceres Imaging) is an Oakland-based agtech company that flies fixed-wing aircraft over farmland with custom-built spectral sensors, then uses machine learning to turn the resulting imagery into plant-level insight on water, nutrients and crop stress. Founded in 2014 during California's drought, the company now serves growers, agribusinesses, lenders and insurers across four continents.
Verdi is a Vancouver-based agtech company building affordable, retrofit-ready irrigation automation systems for orchards, vineyards, and specialty crop farms. Founded in 2020 by UBC Engineering Physics graduates Arthur Chen and Roman Kozak, the company makes wireless IoT controllers and soil moisture sensors that install in minutes on existing irrigation infrastructure. Its AI-powered platform gives farmers real-time monitoring, leak detection, variable rate irrigation, and fertigation control from a mobile app - delivering documented results of up to 70% water savings, 90% labor reduction, and 10-20% yield increases. Backed by $9.5M total funding including a $6.5M CAD seed round in May 2025, Verdi counts E&J Gallo, Arterra Wines, and UC Davis among its customers, with 16,000+ acres automated across North America.
Jim Kim is the Founder and General Partner of Builders VC, a San Francisco-based venture firm deploying capital into the unglamorous corners of the economy - agriculture, industrial technology, healthcare IT, and real estate - where pen and paper still govern billion-dollar decisions. A product of MIT and Columbia Business School, Kim has logged stints at GE Capital (where he built the company's venture arm), Khosla Ventures, and Formation 8 before launching Builders with a thesis that the most interesting returns live in sectors most investors won't touch. Three funds and $368M+ later, his portfolio spans synthetic biology (Bolt Threads), precision cattle data (Performance Livestock Analytics), construction tech (Fieldwire), and de-extinction biotech (Colossal). He practices kung fu, tends a Cabernet vineyard, and has been waiting his whole career for the U.S. soccer team to win a World Cup.
Matt Rappaport is General Partner at Future Frontier Capital, a pre-seed frontier technology VC fund based in Berkeley, California. A former professional musician who studied West African Sabar drumming in Senegal, Rappaport brings an unconventional lens to deep tech investing - 20+ years of IP strategy expertise, a faculty role at UC Berkeley's Fung Institute, and a data-driven methodology using patent landscape analytics to identify emerging sectors before mainstream adoption. He co-founded FFC with longtime partner Mark Garner in late 2023, building a portfolio of 100+ early-stage startups across AI, biotech, robotics, climate, and advanced materials - achieving nearly 11X TVPI on previous investments.
Shane Dyer is the CEO and co-founder of Irrigreen, an Edina, Minnesota-based company reinventing residential lawn irrigation with AI-powered digital sprinkler systems that use up to 50% less water than conventional setups. A Stanford-trained computer systems engineer and serial entrepreneur with three company foundings under his belt - including Arrayent, an IoT platform acquired for $37M - Dyer applied inkjet printing precision to lawn sprinklers, creating a 'water printing' system now deployed across 300+ installation partners in nearly every U.S. state. Irrigreen raised a $19M Series A in April 2025, bringing total funding to $35.89M, and has saved 400 million gallons of water for customers to date.
Arthur Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Verdi, a Vancouver-based agtech company building affordable, wireless precision irrigation automation for specialty crop farmers. A first-generation Taiwanese-Canadian engineer, Chen studied Engineering Physics at UBC on a Schulich Leader Scholarship before launching Verdi from an academic capstone project in 2020. By 2025, Verdi's IoT platform operates on over 5,000 acres across North America, has saved more than 100 million liters of water, and raised $9.5 million in venture funding - making farm automation accessible to the 95% of growers who've never been able to afford it.
Ramsey Masri is the CEO of Ceres AI (formerly Ceres Imaging), an Oakland-based agricultural intelligence platform that has analyzed over 17 billion plant-level measurements across 32 million acres and 40+ crop types worldwide. A UC Berkeley graduate who grew up on a family farm in Peru and spent 20 years as a California grape grower in Napa Valley, Masri bridges the worlds of technology, data analytics, and hands-on farming. Before Ceres, he served as COO at Zendrive and spent his early career at Oracle working under Larry Ellison, Ray Lane, and Tom Siebel. Under his leadership, Ceres rebranded as Ceres AI, raised a $13M Series D round led by Remus Capital in 2024-2025, was named to TIME Magazine's 2024 Top GreenTech Companies list, and made history by appointing the first AI board member in the agriculture industry.
Po-Jui 'Ray' Chiu is CEO and Co-Founder of Calyx (formerly BioInspira), a Berkeley-based agtech company that brings AI vision and bio-engineered phage sensors to poultry and livestock farming. A Forbes 30 Under 30 Energy honoree (2019), Chiu built his company out of a UC Berkeley capstone project and a personal brush with disaster - the 2014 Kaohsiung gas explosions that threatened his relatives' neighborhood in Taiwan. Today, Calyx's AI Eye camera system predicts chicken weights at 98.4% accuracy across 17+ million birds, while its Y-Series sensors monitor ammonia, CO2, temperature, and humidity in real time.
Tyler Niday is the co-founder and CEO of Bonsai Robotics, a San Jose-based agtech startup building AI-first autonomy software and hardware for farming. With a background in agricultural engineering from Cal Poly SLO and a systems design master's from MIT, Niday spent seven years at Blue River Technology helping develop the landmark See & Spray precision herbicide system before founding Bonsai in 2022. Under his leadership, Bonsai has raised $28.5M in total funding, deployed vision-based autonomy across 500,000+ acres, and in July 2025 acquired farm-ng to combine software expertise with modular electric robotics - positioning the company to be the world leader in autonomy software for intelligent outdoor machines in harsh environments.