NovoNutrients is looking to solve this problem with a radically different approach, growing high-quality bacterial protein from waste carbon dioxide. Their microbes break down industrial emissions of carbon dioxide and reassemble them into low-cost and nutrient-rich aquaculture feed and specialty ingredients, which sequesters the pollution and turns it into high-value proteins.

Vertical farms are exploding, but why grow lettuce? There’s something else you can grow that generates 12x more revenue, on the same minimal land footprint. No, it’s not marijuana. It’s shrimp – in multi-story vertical oceans.

Humankind’s future will include cultured meat and plant-based meat, but it will also include sustainably grown animal protein. What “self-driving” is to the car industry, “self-cleaning” is to the booming aquaculture industry. Zero waste, zero effluent. With Feed-Conversion-Ratios (FCRs) below 1.0. Vertical Oceans aims to be the world’s first seafood company to reach these hallowed benchmarks. The whole system is run on their biocomputer. Having just moved from their pilot facility to a larger demo facility in Singapore, they’ll be running four harvests this spring and are coming to Chicago soon.

Reazent makes truly biological fertilizers by leveraging this symbiotic relationship between plants and bacteria. By being able to turn on a metabolic switch in bacteria, Reazent can make a fertilizer that is organic and more sustainable than the leading agrochemicals, while also being as (or more) effective. Reazent’s biological fertilizer can be applied to any crop, and is currently being tested in multiple field trials all over the world, and has already acquired a scale up partnership.

This is why our mission is to design growth media that provides a collective benefit to the whole industry by lowering entry barriers, shortening routes to market, and supporting scale. Multus Media is accelerating the forefront of an industry that will replace the devastating impacts of livestock agriculture.

Diptera.ai’s technology cuts the cost of sterile insect control (SIT) – a natural and highly efficient insect birth control method – to make it a widespread solution against mosquitoes. Diptera.ai combines computer vision and deep biological knowledge to fight mosquitoes and their diseases. Diptera.ai uses non-GMO technology that eliminates the need to build a mosquito rearing and sorting facility near every release site.

Beeflow’s bee health supplements and bee hive management supercharge pollination, leading to an increase crop yields and improve the quality of fruits and seeds, without compromising the health of bees. By measuring pollination and bee-plant interactions Beeflow can help farmers plan water use, fertilizer use and enhance farm inventory management. The company has been running successfull pilot programs over the past two years, delivering unprecedented yields and now rapidly scaling to expand operations to farms across the West Coat and Latin America, covering almonds, berries and more.

Alora removes land and freshwater as agricultural constraints, by helping crops that are normally grown on land to grow in the ocean. By removing land and freshwater as key constraints they can grow crops 20X cheaper than on land. The scientific insight came from mangroves and seagrasses that have genes that are highly efficient in managing salt. Alora’s first crop is rice, a crop that feeds over half the world’s population, but is also a notorious methane producer because of the soil bacteria. By growing rice in floating ocean paddies, they will be able to provide food security to the world while also offsetting CO2 emissions

BugBiome harnesses nature’s own defenses to protect crops from pests without any harm to people or pollinators. The team sources bioprotectants from the microbiomes of plants that have evolved to eliminate the target pest. BugBiome then uses a specialized consortia of microbes to camouflage the bioprotectant, luring in pests while minimizing their ability to develop resistance.

BugBiome’s key advantage is AvidX, a high-throughput screening platform that observes multiple aspects of insect behavior to identify microbes with diverse modes of protecting crops. These include feeding deterrents, egg-laying inhibitors, and toxins, which can be combined to mimic the microbial communities that thwart pests in nature. BugBiome aims for AvidX to be significantly faster and more cost-effective than existing screening methods, which examine one behavior and microbe at a time in conditions unrepresentative of a real farm.

BugBiome was co-founded by Dr. Alicia Showering, PhD in molecular microbiology for disease control, and Christopher Mosedale, an entrepreneur specializing in biotech commercialization. They aim to first produce an evidence-backed bioprotectant against aphids, a global threat to food security through the plant viruses they transmit. Ultimately, BugBiome’s technology might have an answer for every plant pest that harms humanity.

Semion turns the table on pests with sprayable biological products that activate dormant defense mechanisms in crops. Its first solution targets the corn leafhopper, a major corn pest devastating crops in the Americas.

In field trials, Semion’s solution effectively controlled the pest and its associated diseases, resulting in an average yield increase of 30% compared to untreated crops—at one-third the cost that farmers would have otherwise spent on ineffective pesticides. Pests are unlikely to evolve resistance to Semion’s treatment because it activates plants’ diverse natural defense mechanisms, including dynamic and indirect defenses like attracting natural enemies, which are challenging for pests to overcome.

Semion’s CEO, Emilio Molina, grew up in a farming family and saw firsthand how increasing reliance on pesticides made their livelihood unsustainable. At age 22, Molina received a $100,000 grant from Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian to drop out of college and do something about it. He co-founded Semion with chemical ecologist Victoria Coll Aráoz, PhD, agricultural engineer Alejandro Forlin, and entomologist Jorge Hill, PhD. Their mission is to create novel pest control technologies to help farmers thrive and secure the global food supply.

Pheronym’s technology improves plant health and crop yield using a new pheromone to control parasitic roundworms and control insect pests in the soil, enabling farmers and cultivators to apply bio-pesticides for eliminating insects without affecting the plant’s health and freshness.