With farmers around the world facing unprecedented challenges from radical climate change while struggling to produce more food for a growing global population, they are resorting to prophylactic pesticide use, making crop yields become more unpredictable.
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Israeli agtech startup InnerPlant was founded in 2018 with the vision of revolutionizing farming by developing genetically adapted living sensors that would help farmers grow plants more sustainably, cutting their reliance on pesticides and fertilizer.
InnerPlant delivers this flow of data by tapping the natural defenses of plants, which have evolved sophisticated defense mechanisms to protect themselves from environmental stresses. InnerPlant piggybacks on these signals by adding a safe protein, long studied for human consumption, to plants' capabilities. When plants are thirsty, short of nutrients, or under attack by pests or fungi, they generate different optical signals that can be seen in daylight using common optical filters on devices ranging from an iPhone or tractor to a satellite.
On Friday, InnerPlant announced a successful $5.65 million seed + pre-seed funding round, led by MS&AD Ventures, the investment arm of the Japanese insurance titan MS&AD Insurance Group, with participation from Bee Partners, Up West, and TAU Ventures.
Farmers routinely see up to 20% of their harvests destroyed by pathogens that could have been controlled with earlier detection and more responsive, plant-specific interventions. InnerPlant's approach to collecting data directly from plants and its use of advanced algorithms to process the data provides plant-by-plant status that cannot be secured through external sensors.
"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," says Shely Aronov, founder and of 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," Aronov explains.
Nimrod Cohen, managing partner at TAU Ventures, said, "We are happy to support Shely and her exceptional venture from the start. InnerPlant has real potential to become a large company which will impact one of the biggest problems in the world. with Shely, the sky is the limit."
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