Switch Bioworks, a biotechnology company developing low-cost and sustainable fertilizers, announced it raised $17 million in Series Seed financing led by Change Forces Capital and joined by Grantham Foundation, Astanor Ventures, Acre Venture Partners, Anthos Capital, Thia Ventures, Emerson Collective, as well as the farmer-led Ag Ventures Alliance and others.
Nitrogen fertilizer is an expensive yet essential crop nutrient, supporting the food supply of half the world’s population. Current manufacturing is largely based on fossil fuels and leads to over a gigaton of CO2 equivalent emissions and many damaging environmental consequences such as fertilizer run-off and eutrophication. Switch Bioworks engineers symbiotic, nitrogen-fixing microbes that live on plant roots to replace conventional fertilizer, a solution that is carbon-neutral and lower-cost.
“Not many people realize that their food is grown with fossil-fuel-based fertilizer. If we want to decarbonize our economy, we must find new ways to provide crops with nutrients,” said Kartick Kumar, Managing Partner and CEO at Change Forces, the new spinout climate fund from King Philanthropies. “The team of talented biotechnology experts at Switch have assembled from around the world to develop an innovative approach that dramatically improves the performance and cost-effectiveness of biofertilizers, tackling a significant climate challenge.”
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“Making nitrogen fertilizer with biology is something that scientists have tried to do for 50 years,” said founder and CEO of Switch Bioworks, Dr. Tim Schnabel. “What’s been limiting the efficacy of biofertilizers is that as soon as microbes are engineered to make fertilizer, it’s so energy intensive that they are no longer able to compete with native microbes in soil and on plant roots. That’s a problem, because if your microbes get outcompeted in a matter of days, they can’t make a meaningful amount of fertilizer over the crop growing season. At Switch, we’re pioneering a ‘switchable’ engineering approach that enables microbes to first compete and establish themselves on plant roots before switching on fertilizer production.”
The first product Switch Bioworks is developing will be a consortium of diverse symbiotic microbes, where each member is engineered to release nitrogen fertilizer under precise genetic control. Applied at planting using existing farmer practices, Switch’s product will cost less than the conventional fertilizer it replaces, helping farmers improve their bottom line – fertilizer is one of the biggest operating expenses of farming.
Since the potential benefits of switches go beyond nitrogen, the company has developed a modular platform of switches that can improve the performance of many precision-engineered biological products and is actively building R&D and product development collaborations in the agriculture and biotech industries.
SOURCE: PRNewswire