Our Investments: Biome Makers

• Headquarters: Sacramento, California
• Founders: Dr. Alberto Acedo and Adrián Ferrero
• Industry: Agriculture / Sustainability / Bioinformatics 
• Website: https://biomemakers.com/

Founded in California's Silicon Valley in 2015, Biome Makers is a global agtech leader providing microbiome insights to empower smart agriculture. The company has developed a patented technology integrating DNA Sequencing and ecological computing technologies using one of the most complex biomarkers: the soil microbiome. At a high level, maintaining a healthy soil microbiome isn't just important for the plants, it's critical for the environment. Biome Makers has a robust product portfolio and traction. To date, they've collected the largest database of soil microbiome samples.

More on Biome Makers: 

• Undcovering a new area of soil health: Agriculture’s current understanding of soil health is more chemistry-based, overlooking the biological layer of the soil microbiome. By better understanding these soil microbes, we can better understand crop needs, meaning growers can boost food production, food quality, and build efficiencies around crop yields. Until the recent microbiome breakthroughs from Biome Makers, agronomists have never had access to the kind of vital data required to make predictive crop decisions.
• Leading with sustainable farming practices: Modern agriculture is a major pollutant - agriculture and livestock today take up ~50% of all habitable land, using 70% of the world’s freshwater - and a leading cause of global greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, overfertilization and plowing/tilling have been degrading and eroding the soil, which actively kills naturally occurring soil microbes in the process. This makes it progressively harder to achieve the same productivity levels without using increasing amounts of water, fertilizer, and pesticides (which leads to further pollution and water wastage).
• Strong founding team: Adrián Ferrero and Dr. Alberto Acedo bring a strong mix of commercial and scientific experience, and successfully sold their previous sequencing company before starting Biome Makers. The team has also recruited key product, talent and agriculture industry veterans.

We believe this space – agriculture biologicals – is just beginning to take off. We support the company’s mission to change farming practices and output for the better.

The press release on the full investment news can be found here: Prosus.com/Biome Makers