Indigo Agriculture
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| Private | |
| Industry | Agriculture |
| Founded | 2016 |
| Headquarters | Charlestown, MA |
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Key people
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David Perry, Geoffrey von Maltzahn |
| Website | http://indigoag.com/ |
Indigo Agriculture is a startup using plant microbiomes to strengthen crops against disease and drought to increase crop yield for farmers. Indigo is attempting to reintroduce microbes to plants that have been lost due to modern agriculture.
Indigo was inspired by research on the human microbiome - "the trillions of microbes that live on and around us, affecting everything from our mood to how likely we are to get cancer,” according to Fast Company. This led to the discovery that microorganisms, or bacteria, play an important role in both human and plant health.
Indigo uses seed coatings to reintroduce plant microbes into plant ecosystems in a process Fast Company compared to “probiotics for plants.” Existing microbe seed treatment methods used in agriculture inject microbes in the soil near a plant’s roots, whereas Indigo focuses on microbe populations that live within plant tissue. Initial field test results indicate Indigo’s seed coatings can lead to yield increases of over 10 percent compared to untreated crops.
In July 2016, the company announced their first product, Indigo Cotton, a seed treatment containing bacteria harvested from cotton plants that has shown to improve yields under drought conditions.
Founded by Geoffrey von Maltzahn, PhD, and led by CEO David Perry, Indigo launched publicly in February 2016. The company has raised over $156 million in venture capital funding, led by Flagship Ventures (renamed Flagship Pioneering in 2016) and Alaska Permanent Fund. Indigo’s Series C is noted to be the largest private equity financing in the agricultural technology sector.
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Wikipedia