Lilac Agriculture has raised an oversubscribed $2.3 million seed round to work on what its founders call the black box of rhizobial inoculants: products farmers buy to fix nitrogen that may never reach the root at all.

The round was led by Innova with support from 701 Fund, Ag Ventures Alliance, Evergreen Climate Innovations, the North Dakota Development Fund, Pathway Ventures, Tall Grass Ventures and others.

Inoculating pulse crops with rhizobia is standard practice in the major growing regions. The bacteria colonise the roots and form nodules, where they fix atmospheric nitrogen into a form the plant can use.

The trouble, says Lilac chief executive Natalie DiNicola, is that native soil bacteria frequently outcompete the inoculant, so growers pay for a product that may be achieving nothing. It does not matter how good an inoculant is at fixing nitrogen, she says, if it has no real chance of colonising the crop.

The company was founded in 2024 by Dr Barney Geddes, an assistant professor at North Dakota State University, the agricultural technology veterans Matt Crisp and Tom Snipes, and NDSU biotechnology graduate Wyatt Warkenthien. Geddes would dig up roots, plate out the nodules and find that the bacteria inside were not the bacteria in the commercial product the farmer had bought.

Lilac's platform screens the diversity already held in NDSU's collection for two traits at once: nitrogen-fixing efficiency and competitiveness against whatever is already in the soil.

For pulse growers the practical question is whether a season's inoculant spend delivers nitrogen or not. In Bangladesh, where lentil, chickpea and grasspea are grown largely on residual moisture with little fertiliser, a reliable inoculant is one of the cheapest routes to a better yield.

Source: AgFunderNews