Robigo Bio has closed a Series A financing round to speed the commercial launch of crop biological products that the company says can match or outperform synthetic chemistries rather than merely complement them. Leaps by Bayer, the venture arm of Bayer, led the round, with Illumina Ventures, SVG Thrive, Congruent Ventures and Endeavor8 taking part. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company has two products heading toward market. The first, an engineered microbial seed treatment against Sudden Death Syndrome (SDS) in soybean, is slated for launch in 2028. The second, aimed at fusarium wilt in lettuce and berries, is due in 2029. The funding will also pay for an expansion into soil-borne pathogens in broad-acre crops, a market Robigo puts at $10 billion, and for continued registration work.

Robigo's approach differs from nearly every microbial product on sale today. Most rely on wild-type organisms, naturally occurring microbes selected for a useful trait such as antifungal activity or nitrogen fixation, so development is largely a hunt for the right strain. Robigo instead starts with microbes chosen for shelf stability and manufacturing economics and then engineers in new traits computationally, covering both the active bio-ingredients and safety parameters.

"We identify microbes that serve as a really solid foundation to build high-performing products on top of — they have the shelf stability, they have the manufacturing capabilities to be cost-effective — and then we engineer in these new traits that allow us to be much higher performing than what biologicals are doing today, and also have a really improved safety profile," said Dr. Andee Wallace, founder and CEO of Robigo.

For growers, the products are applied once as a seed treatment; the microbes then produce and deliver the active ingredients throughout the season, with no change to existing workflows. Robigo says they do not need cold-chain storage, long a logistical headache for biologicals. Its ARGO platform combines strain engineering, strain selection and computational design of the bioactive compounds the microbes produce, and the company claims it can take a new product from design to field-tested in under 20 months, against an industry norm of roughly three to five years.

Field trials last year marked what Robigo believes is a regulatory first: field deployment of a living engineered microbe expressing new traits, cleared by the USDA and the EPA. Early data are encouraging, Wallace said. The soybean SDS treatment is on track to match commercially available chemistries at half the cost, which matters when SDS causes an estimated $200–500 million in annual losses for US soybean farmers. The fusarium wilt product for specialty crops showed a threefold yield increase over untreated controls.

The investment extends a multi-year relationship between Robigo and Leaps. "They are not just developing a single product but rather building an engine that can rapidly address diverse soil-borne pathogens across broadacre crops," said Dr. Juergen Eckhardt, EVP and head of Leaps by Bayer, in a statement. Robigo raised its seed round at the end of 2022, closing in early 2023; Wallace acknowledged the difficult funding climate but said having field data on the table made the difference. The company has already begun the regulatory process for its soybean seed treatment, a milestone for an engineered-organism category that is still defining its regulatory path.

Source: AgFunderNews