The Future of AgTech: Balaji Vasudevan Discusses Innovation and Challenges in the Industry

So we just recorded a real treat. We spoke with Dr. Balaji Vasivedin and he is in the sustainable ag tech field, which honestly we did not know much about going into this podcast.

For anyone who has any interest in agtech or anyone who doesn't know what agtech is and wants to learn what it is, this is your episode. Absolutely fascinating stuff going on.

Yeah, this was one of the more interesting episodes for me just because I learned so much about the field. Now he also works with a venture capital firm that's actually based in Morocco and it's working with ag techs basically around the world, but focused on implementation in Africa and the various countries in Africa. So that's really interesting. We talk a little bit about regulatory challenges. It's just a really fascinating episode.

Yeah, great one. To learn a lot of cool information that you probably don't know all the stuff about agtech, because we certainly didn't. And it's a really fascinating field. So we hope you enjoy.

Welcome to Building Biotechs by Recredomics Consulting. We've helped over 90 biotech, life sciences and venture capital firms strategize and hire thousands of employees to scale companies that impact human health. We speak with those at the forefront of growing biotechs to learn their tactics on building these companies from the ground up. I'm Karina Klingman, founder and principal at Recredomics Consulting. Enjoy the show. So welcome. Balaji. We are so happy to have you. Thanks for being with us.

It is my pleasure to be here and thank you for the invite. Karina and Alison.

Absolutely. Our pleasure. So we like to start out by exploring your career path. So if you don't mind, what did you want to be when you were 7? What are you now and how did you get there?

Yeah, that's a good question. When I was seven, to be honest, I didn't know anything about what ag tech was, what agriculture and how even the food came. Food was on my plate, I just ate it. That's it. I don't know how it was produced. Nothing was there. In fact, I was told that when I was seven, just to study. Well, because in India, as parents tell to most of the students or their daughters or kids or sons, that education is the only way path forward. There's no other way. That's how it's being taught in India, at least at that time. So I was also told the same. So at 7, I was only told to study. Well, that's all they told me. So I never had any clue. But after, when I Went into grad school like bs. Then I started venturing into the food and ag space because of what I heard about GMO at that time, because the word GMO and the first genetically engineered food was released by Monsanto here in the US in early 1990s at the time in soybean. So the GMO came into picture. Then I started studying what is this gmo? I don't know anything about gmo. I started what is this gmo, what does it mean and what does it do and how it was even generated or produced. So that kind of ignited the spark or curiosity in me to learn about all these new technologies in the food and agriculture space. That's how I kind of gradually kind of went into this food and agriculture space as my career.

I love that. I have a lot of questions for you about GMOs and some of the things that we have, we think of in society about GMOs and what it really is. But first let's kind of explore, yeah, a little bit more of your background and then we'll dive into some of those questions. So you have been in the field for quite a while and you also do a lot of mentorship in the form of staff startups and things like that. Have you seen that from that initial interest in getting into the GMO research to today, your interests have changed or the things that you try and make an impact with have changed.

I have been in food and agricultural business starting from university or academia, then into industry, now into a VC world and startups for the past 20 years combined. And the ACTEC has been evolving for the past few decades and starting my interest in GMO gradually I tend to learn about other technologies in food and agricultural space that went into R and D and also food production like synthetic biology technology like gene editing, RNA spaces, biologicals and plant molecular farming and RNA based biopesticides, the novel foods. So there are lots of technologies within the food and agricultural space that I had the opportunity to work in R and D in the past 15 years when I used to work in industry and academia and that had an impact on me. And now I am trying to coach or mentor the next gen entrepreneurs, particularly the founders of the startups with all the information I had gained in all these years to them by sharing to them and also updating myself on a daily basis because the field is changing every single day. I'm trying to keep myself updated to the extent possible.

I think that's a really interesting point. When we talk about ag tech, I don't know how familiar everyone really is with what that even means. Could you give us sort of the layman's example and maybe like a definition for someone who's just coming into this totally blind. Like when we talk about ag tech, what are talking about?

Yes, yeah, that is again another good question because you can see in a lot of these newspapers, blogs and articles people use agtech, agri food tech. There are a lot of this technical jargons being thrown around for a common man. Sometimes it is confusing. What is this agtech and agri food tech? You know, even though it sounds similar, but there is some kind of difference between that. To put in layman's terms, agtech generally refers to all kinds of technology, any kind of technology or a combination of technology that is involved in optimizing a crop or a plant growth and its yield. Ultimately you want more from a given crop. More bushel in the case of corn, or more pods in the case of soybean and all those cases. So it's all about technologies improving the plant growth or optimizing the crop production. That is agtech. When it comes to agri food tech. Agri food tech is transformation of this crop or the crop products into food products that involves protection, processing and distribution. All these things is kind of put under the umbrella of agri food tech. So the crop production is technologies for crop production is agtech and the downstream events of translating these crop products into food products, that is food tech or agri food tech. That is the kind of a basic difference.

Thank you, that is very helpful.

Yeah, definitely. So to think about some of the maybe mainstream examples of this, when you were mentioning Monsanto before, I think a lot of people, they know of things like the Roundup ready product that have corn, soybeans and then what are some mainstream examples of agri food tech that people might go oh yeah, I've heard of that or I know about that, that are kind of coming down the.

Pipe for agtech and agri food tech. Some of the mainstream products are as you mentioned, you know, the GMO has been there for the past 30 years starting with the herbicide tolerant soybean to Roundup Ready and a lot of drought rest and corn Drought rest and soybean and canola and all the other crops is there. And now recently if you take gene editing is coming into the picture for the past 10 years, you know, and it's also a Nobel prize winning technology, the CRISPR gene editing technology. And when it comes to the and CRISPR is applied all over the Places across the range of industries, not just food and agriculture, but when it comes to food and agriculture, you can see the high oleic soybean meaning a soybean enriched for high amount of oleic acid. Good fat, not the bad fat. That was developed by gene editing by a company called Calix in Minnesota. That was the very first gene edited product to be approved and commercialized in the entire world. And here in the US in 2019 and followed by that, if you go to Japan there is a tomato that was enriched for gaba, GABA meaning gamma aminobutyric acid that regulates or controls the blood pressure. It's good for patients who have this blood pressure problem and if you take that GABA tomato, their blood pressure is under control. This is a gene edited product that was developed by a company called Sanitec Seeds in Japan. It was approved by Japanese government and it is now commercialized. And there are a lot of other products in the pipeline. For example now if you take synthetic biology technology, there is a plant based coffee meaning a sill based coffee. You don't need a coffee plant to get a coffee pot to get the coffee made anymore. All you can do is make a sill based coffee in the lab. Similarly, sill based chocolate, silk based wood, sil based cotton. There's a company in Boston called Galley which is making sill based cotton. And even now there is this company in stealth mode in uk they are trying to make coming up with a technology to make silk based wheat meaning you, you don't need to grow wheat in the open field to get the wheat grains. You can take the cells and make them into a wheat or wheat powder. So there are a lot of things that's happening in this agtech products. And also the meat protein. If you don't want to eat meat like cow or a beef or a pork in order to get the meat protein. Now the same meat protein is being made in soybean seeds by a company called Mulek. That's the first IPO company. So there are a lot of changes going on in this agri food tech industry. Both using plants as a host and also using microbes as a host to produce all kinds of food and food related products.

Well I have to tell you that's a really big relief for me because I am a huge coffee drinker and every now and then I'll see an article about like the scarcity of coffee.

Beans and I'm like, I don't know.

What'S going to happen but it's not going to Be good. I can promise nothing good comes when we lose coffee and chocolate.

And you can add banana in the list. Also, because banana cultivation is under threat by a fungus that's going to wipe out the entire banana if something is not done urgently. There's something like Covid for humans. COVID pandemic and banana disease is called Panama disease of banana. It is included officially in the crop pandemic list. Like a human pandemic crop pandemic. There are about 10 diseases in the crop endemic for banana. This is the number one disease and it's a huge threat to all banana growers across the world.

Wow.

I had no idea. I mean, I don't care for bananas as much as I care for coffee, but I do enjoy a good banana. So this sounds like a problem I should also be concerned about. So let's just touch on that a little bit. One of my questions was going to be, you know, when we think about the ag tech industry, what are some of the challenges? I mean, off the top of my head it's, well, I mean, now it's Covid for bananas. That sounds like a huge problem. But additionally, I would think there's some regulatory issues and maybe some conspiracy issues that go on. People don't like their food being messed with. But I'm really interested in like, you know, when you think about the industry, what are the issues that right now you guys are facing as you try to solve these problems?

First, agriculture as a whole is affected by the climate change all over the world. Whoever is directly or indirectly all the stakeholders involved in global food and agriculture, whether they accept or not, there's a lot of talks pro and con about this. But the fact is that the climate change has affected the global agriculture. Global agriculture GDP has gone down tremendously for the past 15 years or so. There's also food insecurity. It led to food insecurity and poverty and hunger. If you see, According to the FAO and the UN data, about 850 million people every single night they go to bed without food. Meaning they're hungry, they go to bed hungry. 850 million, it's not a small number and it's increasing every year. It's increasing. And agtech industry is trying to at least not solve because it's going to take a lot of time mitigate these problems. But agtech industry by whole is facing a lot of issues. Number one is lack of capital investment from the multiple stakeholders. It could be vc, government or private or institution, academia or combination multiple stakeholders. The amount of dollars that's being invested in agtech is increasing compared to last year. But still that is not enough to tackle all these issues. Particularly in the developing countries like in Africa, like in Asia. The amount of investment is not adequate at all. First number two is the regulatory issues. Because whenever agtech industry wants to develop a product then it has to get registered by the governmental body in appropriate country. So there's a lot of regulations and policies that varies from country to country in the world. So they cannot distribute or market the product quite easily because they have to fulfill the regulations for a given country which is different from another country. So that's another big roadblock to getting the products to the market. And IP issues. There's a lot of IP issues because it's an industry and many people are working towards the same problem. Solving the same problem through a combination of technologies there then the IP clash is there. You could have seen this company suing the other company for the IP or panel infringement. Recently there was one news that Cortiva, which is a global agricultural leader, the top five agricultural companies in the world, they are suing Motif, not Inari, a startup based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and near Boston area. They cotevo sued Inari on a patent infringement case regarding to the seed germplasm of corn and soybean fame. Right? So that is another issue. Workforce, another issue. You can find highly talented people in the agtech industry. That's because proper training is not there, particularly in the developing countries. There's a lack of technological innovations, lack of training and the lack of funding for this training. And freedom to operate FTO freedom to operate is another big problem because many of the agtech industry, though they have good ideas, they're not able to execute because some this regulatory, this IP thing comes in, they're not able to operate freely. They are afraid whether we will be sued by this person or that person. So instead of focusing on the real technology court problem, they are looking after the legal problem. There are a lot of problems burgeoning agtech industries and also it is kind of hub specific. It is not. The agtech industry is not spread randomly across the world. It is centered in certain areas, you know, and many of the inventions and many of the IP should be democratized for all the people involved in the agtech industry can to operate freely and use that IP to develop some solutions for the farmers.

I have a question and this might just be my absolute ignorance shining through. So one of the things you mentioned was the lack of capital and the lack of funding and I'm really interested in that. Why do you think that agtech is having this capital issue? Is it what we're seeing kind of across the board where money is just tighter right now and there's not the investment? Or is this a more historical problem where it's either just not as attractive to investors for a variety of reasons? You would think governments would have a really vested interest in heavily investing into.

Ag tech Actec in general, if you take we go back to years, 30, 40 years before the amount of investment was very, very low. It was rock bottom. But the investment scenario got improved. For the past five years, 2021 was the best period in record for the agtech investment industry. About close to $30 billion went to the ag tech field from the VCs and other private equity markets. And 2022 was touching about $50 billion. But now this year in 2023, in not only food and agriculture, but across all sectors, the down and it's a record now, the number of deals that happen now in 2023 is 40% or 50% less from the same time compared to 2021 and 2022. That shows the amount of investment is going down. The reason why the agtech industry is facing low amount of investment generally across period is that throughout the world is because agtech product development takes time. It's not like a software or digital industry where you know, you work for one year, you can come up with the app or you can come up with another model of a cell phone or something like that. This is 10 years of work. Even in order to bring one say food product or bio control solution. Take for example a bio pesticide or a chemical pesticide which is used by the farmer to control the pest and pathogens in his field. The spray he does, the chemical spray he does. In order for that chemical spray, the bottle to reach the farmer's hand, it takes 10 years. The company which is developing has to spend at least 400, $500 million and spend 10 years of their time in order to bring one product to the market. So it's a long time. So the number of investors investing in the ag and the food is comparatively low compared to other digital industries where they can get the ROI return on investment much faster compared to year. This is a decade process. That is one of the main reason, you know, the number of investors are less. But as having said that, people now all realize, irrespective of whatever the technology developed, everybody needs to eat food end of the day, no matter what. All the 8 billion people living on Earth needs to eat food. So definitely now everybody realizes, all the stakeholders will realize that however long it takes, whether there is a ROI or not, immediately we have to invest. Otherwise we are not able to develop solutions to mitigate this climate change, the pest problems, the food insecurity problems. So there is some good talk going on across the stakeholders. So I believe that the scenarios improving as shown in the 2021 data and 2022 data and probably after this global economic downturn gets a little bit okay, maybe in 2024, 2025 again, the picture will kind of come back to 2021 stage. So that is the scenario.

Now that's really fascinating. So I went to an ag school. I don't know if I shared that with you. My undergrad is animal science and I went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and I worked in a lab there and we were studying, we were, it was a molecular biology lab and it was just at the cusp of of genome sequencing project was very exciting, you know, during that time. And one thing that I remember actually having protesters at our school about was quote unquote GMOs. But blanket statement and the public perception about GMOs. And now we see on packaging all the time like no GMOs and it's like a movement and then there's a counter movement which is that people do not want to have unsustainable agriculture. They want agriculture that is done better. They want fewer pesticides, they want less water usage, they don't want to cut down the rainforest. So these seem to me to be competing ideals. And I'm curious how the industry is trying to address that from almost a PR standpoint because maybe that affects the funding at the same time.

Yes. Now all the industries, particularly in the food and agriculture space, whether it's a startup, global or a mid sized company, everybody is putting that sustainability quotient into the plan, action plan or a budget or whatever is that if you take global companies like say for example Nestle, Cargill, they are all the leaders, the number one leaders and bunch, all these, the big players, you know, they are now putting lot of emphasis not only in terms of the finance investment, in terms of the PR communication in all angles to address this sustainability quotient into what they are doing, how the food is being made. In fact, Nestle has decided to procure the raw materials for its product, for their food and beverage products only from areas or from farmers where the food crop is grown or the raw materials are grown sustainable way in a regenerative agriculture, they are putting a lot of effort into regenerative agriculture. These big corporations and similarly majority of the startups now are also putting this esg, the sustainability quotient into the product plan or R and D plan. So for example, most of the startups, most of the companies are now trying to using or promote biological use, use of biologicals in the global food and ag agricultural space. Because when you use biologicals, you are cutting down the use of the chemicals, chemical fertilizer or chemical pesticides. Because the production of the chemical fertilizer and chemical pesticides, if you go back see, it involves huge amount, it releases large amount of environmental footprint or GHG emission. So you not cut down on that. So use less chemical and supplement or complement with the alternative green products like biologicals to produce food in a sustainable way. So on the whole, this sustainable movement, this climate change, this carbon footprint reduction of GHG emission, all these things are being talked about not only by the global corporations, but across multiple stakeholders, including consumers. As you said. Now consumers also want to play a part in this role. They want to know, okay, I'm also playing a small role in this. Even though the price is little bit higher for some of the food products made in that way, some of the consumers are ready to pay that extra back, not to make sure that they are contributing to save or restore the planet Earth.

I'm curious, is there a country that you think gets it more right than other countries? I'm pretty sure there's no country that has it perfect. But with every country having its own laws around food and agriculture, when you look at the global landscape, is there one place that you're like, well, if we could just get everyone else to copy this place, things would go better.

I originally come from India. Now I am a US citizen, but originally my home country is India. I would put based on the global landscape, food and agriculture landscape, I would put US as the leader. Not because US is economically strong compared to other countries, not from the economic perspective, but because of the laws and the regulations and adoption of the new technologies. If you see gmo, they were first made in the us. If you see the gene editing, the first product came soybean was in the us. That's because why of course, technologically, from the R and D standpoint, US is strong. That is one thing. And also from the regulation of the law. Law permits the creation of the new technologies and adoption of new technologies. So I would kind of, if not full, at least some of the other countries, developing nations, particularly Africa, all The countries in Africa and some of them in the Asia, they have to adopt some of the western philosophies, particularly from the regulatory standpoint, not with other things. Regulatory standpoint in adopting the use of new technologies, not just blanket, no. They have to first understand what is the new technology, what are the benefits it brings that it can serve to the agricultural farmers there in their own country. So try to adopt the new technologies, create and regulate, put forward the policies towards adoption of new technologies and kind of a little bit soften the regulatory process so that the new products can come to the market at a shorter time frame with a limited amount of money spent. I would suggest us as a kind of a model, particularly from a regulatory standpoint, the adoption of new technologies, particularly in the food and agriculture and synthetic biology space. One example, I can say India, with 1.4 billion people, that's a populous country in the world. China is number two. Now India is officially the number one populous country in the world. And until 22, Indian government was kind of very reluctant to adopt gene editing. So generating was not at all approved by India until 22. But with the majority of the stakeholders in India and elsewhere outside of the India pushing the Indian government from all angles, I was also involved in one of the closer meeting in that ultimately, in April 2022, India officially approved gene editing because it now realized that without adopting this new technology like gene editing, they are not able to improve agriculture and feed all the 1.4 billion people there. So that is one example. So like that many countries, Kenya, Nigeria and another country to mention in African continent, they are adapting the new technologies. But whereas other countries within Africa, they are not yet there. Kenya, Nigeria are the number one there. But slowly it is coming up, opening up.

That's really fascinating. I have a million questions. This might be a 12 hour long podcast, I don't know.

I would definitely like to continue on this track. I want to get to some of the venture capital work that you're doing as well. But I think this is so fascinating because we here in the U.S. think of our populace as very divided. It can be very polarizing, the sort of narrative that we see in the media and things like that. But it's really interesting that from a regulatory standpoint, it's actually one of the better places to do science. Even though there's a lot of noise about almost fear mongering and things like that, you know, about things like vaccines. I mean, when we were going through the vaccine development in the pandemic, there were a lot of interesting conspiracy theories about the vaccines and things, and I've seen that with ag tech as well. It's just fascinating. Hey there, just a quick break. I wanted to let you know that if you're listening to this podcast because you are exploring careers in biotech, which is it turns out quite a few of our listeners actually are you might be interested in the Biotech Career Coach podcast. It is brought to you by our sister company, the Collaboratory Career Hub, which is our career development community. If you would like actionable tips on job seeking and career development, that is the place for you. It is a companion podcast to our Career Coach column that we write monthly in Biospace, but we go a little more in depth and sometimes we have special workshops and all of that good stuff. So if that sounds interesting, click the link in the show notes or search for Biotech Career Coach on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts back to the show.

You are currently the AgroBioScience Chief Scientist at Um6p Ventures. Can you tell us a little bit about what that means in sort of your day to day?

My role there at Um6p ventures is to help the ventures to find the right technologies, innovations and the right founders and startups begin those innovations for university and develop the technology and to see whether that technology can directly or indirectly be useful for food agriculture in Morocco and entire Africa. That's the short summary. So what I essentially do is that I kind of scout globally scout first revise the investment thesis area which area to invest in a food and agricultural domain. There are so many things to go after, for example say bio pesticide or alternative produce something like that. And they substantiate my argument with the market and the competitive intelligence report trend report, where is the current trend? Where it is going, the sector is going in five years, ten years from now. So then globally scout for all the people, the founders and the startups begin this technology globally and then run the due diligence to make sure they have a good business model, they have a good idea, good team IP and the resource they have to kind of translate the idea into the ventures. So run the due diligence of the startup and contribute to the investment memo for a startup once it gets invested. I follow up with the founders of the startup by offering venture builder service program. What does it mean is I had the opportunity to work in six industries so far and three were startups and so I had the practical experience of understanding what are the pain points in building and growing a startup from the ground. So I Don't want the founders to go through the same. So I provide the venture builder support service to them. What does that mean? I provide the science help, R and D strategy, regulatory know hows, market branding and technology licensing and scaling, building a collaboration with the partners and even team building. And also when some of the startups interested in moving to the US particularly the Research Triangle park area, North Carolina, which is hub for the biotech. So I kind of facilitate the move. So connect them to the local partners here and then to find a lab space, to find the office space, to find everything, even connect them to the appropriate vendors for everything. So try to establish the ecosystem. So this is what I do and also I outside of this I also am a scientific advisory board member in majority of the portfolio and non portfolio startups across the world, not just in the US even outside of the US and also I contribute to white papers, being a panel member and a keynote speaker in conferences. So all these kind of collateral work or a soft kind of work, I also do to kind of share the information or share what is going on in this particular space to the wider audience. So this is what I do with respect to UM6P ventures and also outside of the UM ventures, I do some private consulting to the startups and help startups with all possible things I just listed out in order for them to be a successful. So my general aim is to be a startup hatcher and a nurser. That's what I would call myself as to promote building the startups and help the entrepreneurs cut short the time and cut short the money to achieve their goals.

Do you have more hours in your day than all the rest of us? Because that is an incredible amount of stuff that you have on your plate. You must see the coolest stuff come across your desk. You must see ideas that never come to fruition but are so cool and futuristic. What are you seeing right now that you think is really exciting? I don't know how much you can share about any of the technology.

Yeah, I can share generally as you said, something is confidential, something is not. But in general, particularly in the food and agriculture space, synthetic biology startups in synthetic. But synthetic biology is a very broad term. There are so many tools that goes into the synthetic biology toolbox. There are some startups in synthetic biology are emerging and they are kind of ballooning now across the world, not just in the US everywhere. I'm seeing lot of startups in this space. They're using synthetic biology and the tools in that to solve many of the problems to make animal proteins in plants to make dairy proteins, cow milk proteins like casein and beta lactoglobulin. You don't need to cow milk anymore to get the protein. You can get the protein from the shelf made using microbes by efficient fermentation technology. Similarly with the egg protein, you don't need a chicken egg to get the all booming protein from the chicken egg white. You can get the same egg made out of yeast or other fungus by a company called Avery in California. And similarly, as I told the plant cell and plant molecular forming technology is another area that is going rapidly expanding. Making cell based coffee, this cell based chocolate and some of the company are also making dairy proteins in plants. There's a company called Bio Better in Israel. They're using plants to make the dairy products, they express the dairy proteins in plants. So lot of this and many of them, many of the synthetic biology companies also work on these biologicals. They want to make biological biostimulants, biofertilizers and biopesticides. Because with this Ukraine, Russia war, everybody realized what is the dependence on this chemical fertilizer to grow the plants. The cost of the chemical fertilizers has kind of skyrocketed during this Ukraine, this Russia war. Farmers were not able to buy that because it was too expensive for them to. But if you don't put fertilizer, the crops are not going to grow. So what is that alternative? Why? What is the alternative with chemical fertilizer? That's where this biofertilizer comes. Using bacteria, fungi and other kinds of nematodes and other biological organisms, they can now make the biofertilizers. And there are a lot of companies growing in this area and a lot of investment also going into this area. And also same thing with biopesticides. You don't want chemical pesticides to take care of your pest and pathogens that's attacking the plants. You want some alternative green solutions. That's where these biologicals and biopic is also coming into play. The RNA world is expanding very well. In addition to vaccine side use of RNA for the vaccines like COVID vaccine we all had, there's another application of RNA for the food and agricultural side. That is where you spray RNA instead of the chemical. And RNA is going to take care of your plant from your pest and pathogens. And the first product that is going to come from this RNA control is from a company called Greenlight Biosciences and which where I had the opportunity to work for three years and their product is very close to EPA approval. Now, because you have to get registered with the epa. They're almost there with the EPA approval and then they will commercialize and get the first product to the market that will be the world's first RNA product. So like this lot of things happening in the space on the whole, the synthetic biology is playing a major role. And that's why people, eminent Eric Shmiel was the former Google CEO and Bill Gates and all these big people, they are putting a lot of money from their own organizations like Kimid Futures and Bill Gates Gates foundation into synthetic biology startups. And there was a report in McKinsey which told that synthetic biology is going to rule the world, rule the economy. Global economy is going to touch $4 trillion in the next few decades. Also another report in BCG, Pawson Consulting Group which also said that synthetic biology is going to disrupt every possible industry. Not only food and agriculture, textile, material, construction, you name it, anything. And even the DNA chip. Now we are using computer chips, right? To store our data right in the computers. That chip will be made of DNA in the coming years. DNA will be used as a storage chip and it can store several thousand times more data than the current chip we have. So this is the expansion.

The only limiting factor we're already doing that is cost. But that cost is coming down day by day.

Yeah. To add to your point regarding the cost, if you talk about the sequencing of a genome 10 years ago, if you go back, what was the cost of sequencing a genome? It was in thousands of dollars, right? Nobody was able to afford it except for the big companies which have a lot of money. But now a startup can do that with $100 because now there is a company that is providing $100 genome sequencing. You give your cells, you want to know what is in your DNA, your genome will be sequenced with just $100. So that is the cost is coming down rapidly with the gene synthesis, genomic sequencing and all these kind of molecular biology technologies. So ultimately the food product cost also is going down. With another point to add to our cost is for example, the plant based burgers or plant based products. When it was first launched, it was way costly than the conventional meat burgers. But if you go now to any grocery aisle in the US or in the European Union, any country, European Union like Germany or anywhere, you can see the price parity is already reached. Similarly, price parity is being worked out for the other food products made using this synthetic biology technologies.

We're kind of a little ways away from being able to have steak that's created by bacteria, but maybe not that far, but as far as, yeah, burgers and other products. How close are we to having synthetic biology products that help us with recycling challenging products like plastics and things like that?

Synthetic biology again is playing a major role in reference to use of the bioplastics. Because you don't want to use the petroleum based regular plastic that comes from the petroleum. That is a lot of climate change, GHG emission footprint, all those problems. You want to use a biodegradable plastic which can be degraded. So what are the things? Synthetic biology is two ways. One, using plants. Some of the companies are using plants to make PFAs which is a polymer for the plastic and using plants. The company like Yield, Yield 10 Bioscience which is based in Boston area, that's one of the premier company on the plant side which is in the bioplastic category. And there are also other companies, synthetic biology companies that are using microbes to produce like bacteria and fungus and various fungal strains to produce this and algae and even some of the algae in some cases to produce bioplastics. But now as we speak it is not very prevalent in the industry market. The product is being developed, the pipeline is there. But when it comes to the market, whether it's actually available or is able to kind of replace the conventional plastic, it is not there. But soon it will come because there are a lot of investment going into that area. Also there is one company in Israel where the UM6 preventures are also invested in the early stage. That company is called Biotic. That company is trying to use marine algae that can use sea water, seawater, not the drinking water or the fresh water. You can use sea water with salt. The algae can grow and it can produce this biopolymer for plant which is a replacement for the plastic. So plastic industry is growing very well. And recently last week also there is a venture capitalist group called in Houston. They also invested in San Diego based algae company that is trying to produce the bioplastic, about $5 million. So industry is catching up on that. But to be honest, we are not yet there. We are in the process. It's going to take some time before a bioplastic hit the market and is being used to produce all kinds of products that a regular plastic is being used now.

It's exciting though, it's good to see. And again we'll have to deal with the price parity issue. And when we do see those things enter the market, they will be more expensive at first and people will have to choose to spend their money there.

Any product coming out of these novel technologies in the first few years, it is going to be expensive. But as day goes by, it will get cheaper. Similar to iPhone, right? When iPhone was launched 10 years ago, right when the first iPhone version was launched, what was the cost of that? Not all the people were able to afford at the time. But now you see every one of them has at least one or sometimes two iPhones. Everything related to I, right, iPad, iPod, iPad, whatever. Because it's now accessible or affordable, people are somehow able to buy that. Similarly, you can put that analogy to the synthetic biology food product that's going to enter the market. Day goes by, years goes by. If the technology innovations, the cost is going to come down.

Switching gears slightly, I wanted to touch on something really quick. So we talked about how you do a lot of mentorship and advising. I think you have a really unique perspective because you're, you know, for the most part advising people who are getting into this ag tech space which we've talked about has a lot of challenges. When you're talking to these new founders or people who are interested in going into this space, what do you tell them? What's your advice and what are some things that new people who want to explore this field should be aware of before they jump in with both feet?

That is a very important question. From talking to different startups globally, what I understood and also from my own experience of working in startups before, what I can say is that first the startup founders who want to venture into the ag tech or start a company company in the ag tech and the food tech world is to first is to understand the problem they are trying to solve. What is the problem first and what is the solution they are trying to bring. To solve the problem there should be a problem solution fit. They have to validate the problem solution fit. If that fit is not there, then sir, that's a problem, there's a problem solution fit is one point. Number two is team. You should have a team, solid team with good complementary skills and trust to execute the idea and to have novel scalable ideas and technology to implement the ideas. And the other thing major thing is that network people, most of the founders of the startups, if you see they are from academic world, they did a postdoc or they probably worked for a couple of years in the industry and then they want to enter into the startup world. They want to become the founders of the startup. They are good in ideas and science. I'm not discounting on that the only problem I see is that they don't have a network in two places. One in industry, they don't have a network in industry. Number two is they don't have a network in the investment world whom to reach out to? Capital. What are the sources of the capital, where the capital is, how to get to the capital. Most of the founders they know only grants like you know from NSF or nih, you know usda, this kind of non dilutive funding from the grants. On top of that they lack the idea like you know there is something like angel investors you can reach out to. Crowdfunding is there. And also you can go to the VC's family office. There's so many other avenues to reach out to for that. Unfortunately you need a network in the investment landscape that is lacking. And another problem I see is that non clarity with the ip. They are not very clear with the IP where they stand with the ip, whether they have IP or they want to license the IP from somebody else not to start the startup. So the lack of clarity with reference to the IP and the freedom property issues. Another thing is that business knowledge or the market competitive and market intelligence is lacking or inadequate. If they have one, it is not enough. Because if you want to develop a startup, you want to know who are your competitors, who are the other people who are doing exactly the same thing as you are in terms of the product development and how different you are from them. That is your USP unique selling point, that USP should be very clear and crisp when you want to raise fund from investors and other people. Right. And these are some of the challenges I see with reference to the startup, the founders.

It seems to me that when we think about saturation of different spaces, when we work with most of our clients, they're in the human health space and they're thinking about this or that. Cancer therapy, neurodegeneration. There's a bunch of hot button issues and they're pretty saturated. There's a lot of companies that have tried a lot of things. There's a huge history of drugs on the market that have either failed. We've talked to other venture capital folks who have said, you know, a big part of the, their funding decisions are looking at the past IP and how did that perform, the related ip, how did, how did that do? Were there toxicity issues, things like that. It seems to me that the AG field would actually be a lot more wide open for, for a number of reasons. First of all the, the initial trials and things like that are not Human health related. So you're not trying to put things into humans at first you are later on. We want, we do want to eat these products and things like that, but. And then just less has been done. It's more of a blue ocean. Am I wrong on that or is it pretty saturated?

Actually, actually you are kind of. Yes or no? I would say in the middle ground. I would say because it depends on which sector within this food and agriculture you are targeting. Because as I said, you know the Food and Agriculture act is a broad umbrella and there are many sub domains or sub sectors within that depending on which sector is that. The industries for example, we take this alternative proteins, I'll give you a classic example that includes plant based food, cultivated meat and precision fermentation based food products. That industry, if you take just provision fermentation, There are about 500,000 companies working around the world for making different products. If you take plant based, it's even more than that, maybe more than thousand is working right now. If you go to the good food list of overall the companies across the world, the list is growing day by day. Every single day you go the list is refreshed with a few additions of the companies. So it's getting this alternative protein sector for example is getting saturated or it's getting close to that at least. Whereas if you take the other sector like soil health, everybody now understands that soil is the key. It was neglected for a very long time. They all said the soil is there. If you just put, throw in the seeds, throw seeds there, it's going to grow and then it's going to produce the fruit or the grains or whatever is that. But they don't understand, you know, it doesn't happen now. The soil is degraded. It was not like before 30, 40 years, it's got polluted, got degraded. There is no nutrients in the soil anymore. So soil health has become an important topic from academia to global corporation to startup. Everywhere that was neglected. But now slowly with the regenerative agricultural movement is getting in limelight now and the number of companies, when you take working on the soil health, soil health diagnostics were very few. You can just count at the time there was nothing actually. But now you can see there are many companies entering into the space. For example trace genomics in California, biomarkers in Spain and you have pattern ag again in California. So like that there are slowly number of companies are coming into the picture. So depending on which sub sector in the broader food and agricultural domain, either it is getting close to saturation or in Some cases it is just starting, but definitely not to the range of clinical companies or therapeutics or the human drug companies, because the number of companies there is more and the number of investment is even more. The number of VCs who is investing into that space is far, far, far higher compared to the number of VGs investing into the food and ag space.

It is really interesting though. I watched a documentary not too long ago about soil health and it seems so obvious when you're watching it that like, yes, of course this would impact everything, right? The climate, how food grows. But it's like you don't think about it because it's just there. But the documentary was fantastic. I just can't remember the name of it off the top of my head. So I am super interested in your answer to this next question, which is what is your favorite book or a book you think that everybody should read?

I'm not a voracious book reader and particularly this fiction books. I never read any fiction books. Usually I go and read the articles on LinkedIn or any published journals like, you know, like Nature Science and all these kind of technical journals I go and read there or I read the articles published on LinkedIn. I read very few books, but one of the books I read in the recent times was Save the Soil by Christine, if I'm right, the author first name is Christine. So that kind of was interesting a book to me at least, because, you know, for me, because I'm not a soil scientist in my R and D, I was never a soil scientist to begin with. I worked a little bit on soil, but I was never a soil scientist actually. But now with reading more articles about the importance of the soils. The soils and how it contributes to the global food production and food security. So with that notion, I thought of reading that book. And that book was interesting to me because it kind of connects the scientists working in the lab and R&D's and the farmers who are actually growing your food in the, in the field, and then the other stakeholders about the importance of the soil, how saving the soil kind of can save the planet and can lead to the global food security. Produce more by protecting your soil. That book I like, actually.

Really, I will definitely read that. It won't bode well for my husband because every time we're in our neighborhood taking a walk, we see like all the beautiful lawns, but they all have like the little sign that they were chemically treated. And it drives me crazy. I'm like, just leave your lawn alone. Like, leave the soil Alone because all the runoff and it's so bad for the animals and like insects. But I mean it's very important. People have to understand like and I also like to garden. So like I don't want to dump a bunch of stuff onto the growing food unless I know that it is actually safe. So yeah, I'm totally going to read the soil book. Thank you.

It was interesting. There are many articles, papers in blogs and other LinkedIn and outside of the LinkedIn which also talks about the importance of the soil in layman's language. You don't need to be a scientist or anything to read that. You know, it's put in a very simple language so that every common man can understand what's going on in the soil. How does it affect the plant growth and also the farmer's income? Because when the soil is bad, when the soil is full of, for example, if you have a soil a farmer doesn't know because he's not a scientist, when the soil is loaded with plant pathogen spores, like fungal spores hidden there in the soil, if you put your crop there, it's going to attack the crop and that's it. Within one month, the entire farm is gone. Acreage of crop is destroyed by the incumbent pathogen in the soil. Right. So that's how these soil companies help these farmers. All you need to do is take 1 gram of soil and send them to the company. They're going to do all the R D and they're going to send you back the data, the file. In a layman's language they say, okay, your soil contains these pathogens, so be preventive in controlling this pathogens crop or your soil is less in phosphorus, less in potassium, less in nitrogen. So add the appropriate fertilizer so that plant growth could be, will not be compromised. So that's what these soil companies are involved in. They're trying to help farmers to kind of diagnose the soil and then tell them. It's like going to a doctor, right? You go to the doctor, the doctor is going to tell everything. Right. About your health. Similarly, regarding the soil health, these companies trying to help the farmers in diagnostic a portion of the soil from the farm and then so that the farmers can be kind of educated about their soil status and they can plan accordingly.

That's fascinating. So this is reminding me of a problem that we have in the horse industry, which I'm an equestrian, but, but we're finding a lot of nutrient deficiencies in horses. And it's because soils have been depleted to an extent where the normal minerals and vitamins you would expect in a quality hay are just not there. So we have a couple of things we do. We send off fecal samples first of all to see what was left over after the horses had consumed the hay. And we also send off the hay samples to see what the sort of first product the hay before it gets digested. We see the whole range and we know then what to supplement our horses. It would be so much easier if people supplemented the soil to begin with so that we don't then have to supplement all of the individual horses for their these mineral.

And there's a cost factor involved to that also.

Yeah, I'm sure that that is rampant in human health too, and we don't even really realize it. Or we with horses you're feeding one thing so it's easy to know what the cause is. With humans, it's a lot different. A huge problem. We could talk to you for all afternoon. This is so fascinating. Obviously this is hitting close to my, you know, origins, scientific origins. I just love it. But for people who want to continue the conversation with you and maybe they're interested in funding for their ag tech company or they want to, you know, get your advice on their startup, where is the best place for them to reach out to you?

Best place is LinkedIn, even more than my email because I'm always there on LinkedIn, so LinkedIn is the best place to reach out to me.

Well, thank you so much. We won't keep you much longer, but this was so fascinating and I definitely will send folks your way. Thank you so much. This was great.

It was my pleasure to be with you to spend the time this morning and share a little bit about the agtech and the food tech industry. It was nice talking to you both.

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