2022 America’s Seed Fund Startup Expo: AgTech and Food Security Panel

So now we're going to actually shift.

From climate and energy to an unrelated.

Session focusing on ag tech and food security.

You know, a safe and secure food.

Chain and the innovative technologies that enable it are of incredible importance to our.

Nation and the world. And all the more so in the.

Wake of a conflict that has impacted a third of our global grain supply.

The innovative companies showcased in this next.

Session are among those leading the way.

In this critical area at the intersection.

Of technology and and agriculture.

And we are privileged to have Laura Appenzeller to moderate this important session and.

Lead the discussion with these incredible companies.

Laura is no stranger to innovation, commercialization, or indeed America's Seed Fund, serving as Assistant Vice Chancellor for Innovation as well.

As Executive Director of the Research park.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

So without further delay, I'm proud to.

Introduce Laura and our incredible ag tech.

And food security ventures.

Hello and thank you for joining the ag tech and food security panel. We are thrilled to have you today at America's Seed Fund Startup Expo. And I'm excited to lead this session. From my home state of Illinois, right here in the heartland of the US with the strongest agriculture output in the world and leading food production, we work with entrepreneurs, startups, researchers and industries every day to think about fast growth areas. And our fastest growth space has been in ag tech. So today I'm excited to have this discussion because it really matters. We just heard about climate change in the last segment and we're going to continue part of that theme, but shift towards the focus in agriculture. The agriculture sector faces growing threats of disrupting our food, water and energy supplies. These challenges impact our food security at a global level. And as we've seen food shortages amidst the pandemic, it's really an important thing that addresses each of our households. It goes without saying that investment in agriculture technologies is necessary and it's important for a sustainable future. The ag space is full of innovative solutions to combat these vital issues. But it has a bigger challenge. There are going to be 2 billion more people that will live on our planet by 2050. While land continues to shrink, we have to have more agricultural output. The spread of prosperity across the world, especially in Asia, is driving an increased demand for meat, eggs, dairy, and boosting pressure to grow more corn and soybeans to feed our cattle, pigs and chickens. These trends continue. The double whammy of population growth and richer diets will really require us to double our production by 2050. In response, we've seen the ag industry take a turn towards new technologies. To increase yields, bolster our supply chain. And in the first half of 2021 alone, more than $4.3 billion was invested in this rapidly growing sector. America's seed fund pays attention and is working with startups to revolutionize this technology sector. Investing in technologies disinfect water, crowdsource cleanup activities, rejuvenate coral reefs and technologies impacting our planet's health that are at the intersection of agriculture and food. Today we're going to see three innovative companies, creative entrepreneurs amongst a large portfolio of agtech. They're working on food insecurity via probiotics, livestock award winning environmental monitoring tools and innovations that will have better output for ag technology. So let's hear from our first company of the day, General Probiotics from St. Paul, Minnesota. Right here in the Midwest. Antibiotic resistance has become a crisis in our health care system. Our poultry is covered with resistant microbes and then when we eat them, we get sick from them.

Over 700,000 people die every year because of bacteria having developed resistance to our antibiotics. This number can explode to over 10 million people every year, higher than the number of people dying from cancer and diabetes combined.

At General Probiotics, we're engineering antimicrobial peptides and antibiotic alternatives that can target and kill different pathogens.

We have demonstrated that our probiotics can eliminate 97% of Salmonella in poultry. This is unprecedented efficacy against pathogens.

Our probiotics can potentially be used against pathogens that otherwise have no treatment options. So we could be saving lives that would otherwise have been lost.

With SBIR awards from the National Science foundation and the usda, we have demonstrated that our technology adds enormous value to livestock production as it enables farmers to raise healthy animals and to produce clean, sustainable and affordable animal protein. In volatile, uncertain times like ours, the security of safe food production in environmentally sustainable ways is the most important imperative. The technology we have developed with SPAR funding saves hundreds of millions of animals every year, reduces production costs and reduces greenhouse emissions. The FDA has deemed our technology innovative and is working with us to register the first advanced probiotic in the United States. We are now raising a price round of capital and we are looking to expand manufacturing to commercial scale. Join us in our efforts to help farmers produce clean, sustainable and affordable animal protein.

Welcome to the virtual stage. Yannis, exciting to hear about your company. You're the founder and CEO and we would love to hear more about your journey as an entrepreneur and starting General Probiotics. Perhaps tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you started this company.

Thank you, Laura. Thrilled to be with all of you today. I am an engineer by training. I studied chemical engineering in Greece, where I come from. I came to the states 28 years ago for graduate school. I went to Notre Dame where I studied chemical and biomolecular engineering. And then I spent a few years at Park, Davis and Pfizer working in drug discovery. I moved to Minnesota 20 plus years ago. Now, when I joined the faculty in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Material Science at the University of Minnesota, we with my research group developed alternatives to antibiotics, alternatives to new antimicrobial technologies that are needed for human health and for animal health. A few years ago, with the help of the Office for Technology Commercialization at the university, we launched the startup. We filed for families of patents again with SBIR funding, we were able to recruit some of the brightest students that were in my research group. A few years ago, I decided to join the startup for you. For the last four years now, I have been running general probiotics and ACTHERA full time.

Great. Well, I'm going to dive into a little bit more of that transition from an academic world to commercialization. But first I want to learn more about the technology. This, as we heard in the video, is really at the intersection of animal health and human health. You're working in the poultry industry. Tell us a little bit more about how by using your probiotic technology, you're able to improve the health perhaps of the chickens in the poultry industry, but also have an output that's going to help us as the consumers of the poultry.

So we start with probiotics. These are microbes that are benign, they're non pathogenic. We have a lot of microbes in our gut and they help us with nutrient uptake, with metabolism. They also help us fight bad pathogens, bacteria that can make us sick. So we start with these probiotics, and what we do is using genetic engineering, we boost the ability of these microbes to fight bad pathogens. We do this by having these probiotics produce and secrete antimicrobial proteins. So these are proteins that, that we select an engineer to kill pathogens like Salmonella, like E. Coli, like clostridia. Inside the gut of hosts, our probiotics are orally administered. They can be added in the water, the food, or the feed of animals. They are engineered so that they can survive the esophagus, the stomach, and they go and reside inside the gastrointestinal tract, where again, we have engineered them to produce these antimicrobial proteins that kill nasty pathogens like salmonella. The work we did at the university was mostly funded by government National Institute of Health Resources focusing on human health applications. But serendipitously, we got a grant from the state of Minnesota to work in animal health, trying to use our probiotics against salmonella in turkey poles and then seeking poults. And we launched the company with a clear vision, with a clear business plan to commercialize this technology in animal health, helping farmers raise healthy animals free of foodborne pathogens.

There's going to be different regulatory pathways likely than you would have for pure play human health. And as you navigate that process, you're using SBIR funding, so you've got just a little bit of time. Can you tell us about your USDA and NSF funding in a minute or so, and then we'll come back to the discussion with the others.

We were thrilled to have been awarded significant support SBIR grants from the National Science foundation and the usda. Both grants supported the development of this technology, platform and products. We are registering with the FDA right now for animal health. There are important differences though. The NSF support was geared toward helping us move from academic research and development to corporate research and development. And it came with required and very useful training in business model generation, in value proposition design. The USDA also helped launch the development and the registration with the fda. And one very useful component of the USDA SBIR program was the Technical and Business Assistant program, which offered budget a budget for us to hire to recruit consultants and advisors to. We may be very good at engineering alternatives to antibiotics, but we needed a lot of help in understanding our customers in poultry production and then reaching out to them. So these advisors and consultants have been key for our success and the traction that we have with commercial partners. At this point, it sounds like you've.

Got a great team and I'm glad you've got two agencies that we can talk a little bit further about as we bring the others together. And thanks to the Small Business Administration for allowing you to share a little bit more about your company and how you're impacting the resistance to antibiotics.

Thank you, Laura.

And next we're excited to bring to you another company that's also going to talk about protein production. And this next company, interestingly, also also comes from Minnesota. So next up we're going to talk about nucleate sensing systems, and they are also St. Paul, Minnesota.

The spread of pathogens, parasites and harmful algal blooms are among the most central concerns of aquaculture producers. Estimated costs from catastrophic losses across the country are in the billions of dollars per year. Some sectors may lose up to an estimated 40% of their production due to emerging diseases. Diseases and pathogens in aquaculture can take many forms and often are regionally and species specific. Aquaculture disease outbreaks are becoming more severe due to increased demands put on production, globalization, broodstock movement, new species and aquaculture, interactions between wild and cultured animals and the effects of climate change. In response, the use of antibiotics preventatively can result in ecological damage, antibiotic resistance and result in ever increasing cost to the producer. Current methods for monitoring disease and invasive species do not provide sufficient information for early mitigative action. All living organisms leave a biological footprint in the form of environmental DNA and rna. The monitoring and detection of these biomolecules are a critical advancement in early detection of biological organisms. Until now, scientists used a costly multi day process of field sample collection and laboratory analysis fraught with limitations. First, the results of EDNA or ERNA analysis only represent a snapshot in time and are prone to errors in accuracy. Second, manual labor and physical consumables are needed in the actual collection, processing and quantification of samples, amplifying potential errors. Third, laboratory analysis of samples is a slow process. Samples must be stabilized and transported for analysis, resulting in a delayed response and losses in production. Some innovations bring laboratory tools to the field, such as automated samplers and on site pcr. These tools require proprietary and often refrigerated physical consumables. All these tools have moving parts and consumables resulting in operational and maintenance issues while still requiring a human for operation, thereby missing the commercial aquaculture needs of autonomously collected continuous real time data that provides actionable results. Nucleic sensing systems design the tracker with the aquaculture operations in mind and will change how the entire industry monitors for organisms and pathogens of concern. The tracker is capable of operating without human labor for both sampling and quantification, acting like a biological smoke alarm. Its sampling capabilities are broad, offering immense power to detect organisms such as bacteria, viruses, invasive species and harmful algal blooms. The tracker design is inherently flexible and able to easily be reconfigured to monitor for new and emerging diseases. It is deployable for indoor use and ruggedized for in field long term deployments. While sampling, it requires no proprietary refrigerated reagents of any kind and can operate via solar power or battery, either continuously or at high frequency. It is capable of monitoring either at a fixed location or in transit, providing a heat map of genetic concentrations for any species of concern. The tracker transmits data to the cloud, providing real time actionable information delivered to the palm of your hand. The tracker will transform the aquaculture industry through early warning of risks. And that can catalyze the most sustainable management practices, reduce antibiotic use and cost, while increasing productivity, product quality and profitability. Nucleic Sensing Systems is here to help suppliers, producers and all industry partners to ensure a consistent supply of aquaculture products to meet the world's ever increasing demand. Come find out more at www.ns2co.com.

Welcome Edgar Rudberg to the stage. We'd love to hear more about Nucleate Sensing. And first as CEO, I wanted to say what great graphics you produced. It was really kind of a fun thing to watch getting ready for this segment. So whoever's your graphic designer, kudos, but maybe we'll shift to actually talking about the technology and I'd love for you to tell us more about aquaculture and how you got interested in this segment of the agriculture and food supply and what you hope to be able to accomplish with your technology.

Sure, absolutely. Laura, thanks so much for having me. Very unfortunately, very long time ago, I was a master's student at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and had worked in marine science prior to that. That was really my first foray into the aquaculture industry and really kind of opened my eyes to the of aquaculture and fast forward more than a decade, let's say find myself in the aquaculture industry again. Had worked a lot in the environmental side of the field, looking at whether it's permitting or otherwise, and got very interested in aquaculture. As we transitioned the technology, the tracker from sensing aquatic invasive species and showing the efficacy of decontamination and thinking a lot more about where's the world going as far as sustainable food production and where can we have the biggest impact. And that's really what brought us back to aquaculture.

So aquaculture, I think you're working with some different agencies, perhaps as your first customers. Is this intended that you'll be selling to commercial operations or are you working with Fish Wildlife Service and more research environments at this stage of the company?

Well, both. Laura, we have great partners at the U.S. fish and Wildlife Service who were early adopters of the technology and were integral when transitioning the technology from the university to a commercial scale. We love our federal agency partners. We've been funded by NOAA for an SBIR and SBIR 2, transitioning from the ability to detect one organism to simultaneously be able to detect three organisms, then the USDA through an SBIR, one has allowed us to incorporate reverse transcription. And I know that's a little bit scientific, if that's even a word, but it allows us to detect viral genetics, and that's particularly of concern not only in aquaculture, but also in wastewater based epidemiology.

Great. And I hope that the SBIR funding is helping you. As a company that's working in hardware and IoT, it can be a challenge to work on initial production and find investors. How are you using this funding to help with initial growth and production of this technology?

Well, that's a really good question. We see the SBIR program is absolutely critical for us. When you have something that's coming out of the university that you know is sitting on a benchtop and very much as a scientific experiment, is really difficult to connect that scientific experiment to business opportunity. And so what the SBIR program has allowed us to do is bring in a team of engineers that are not only on the systems side, but the electrical side, the industrial side, really bring this team together to move that technology from, from the university to a pilot, a beta pilot, which we call it's 2.0, if you will, that will allow us to now go to the market and seek investment. Because now we can show pilots that are working in the field collecting data, and it's far more real and therefore much more intriguing to investors.

Edgar, tell us where you are in terms of investment. Is that something that you're hoping to attract into the company? And how would you get people involved?

Yeah, absolutely. This is something we are actively pursuing now. We've gone through many different incubators. Hatch was the most recent, but clean Tech Open Minnesota Cup. Those have really kind of allowed us to continue to hone our business plan and our financial modeling to the point where we are now starting to actively.

Seek investment to get this initial money from the SBIR program. I know it takes a lot of work, but you were helped by, by the Minnesota Fast Center. We have our own Fast center here. Tell us about the kind of help you had in the application process or administering your programs.

Sure, yeah. A little shout out to Pat Dylan here in Minnesota. She's been amazing, and the program that she's created here has been amazing. I came through with my Ph.D. comfortable with writing grants, but those types of grants are very different than an SBIR grant. And we had called her up the first time we saw one. It's like, oh, it's 10 days before. Do you think we can bang this out? And she looked at me like, I was crazy and really helped guided us to, you know, the type of partnerships that are ideal for these type of applications. You know, whether it's bringing in university partners, state partners, you know, sites that have pilots and really helped guide us along the way. And so I would say anyone that's thinking about SBIR or applying to an SBIR to reach out to their state programs, it's free consulting and it's a great, great help.

So don't go it alone. And please give your person trying to help you more than 10 days notice as my little plug since Edgar was on the last minute pathway, but obviously successful in obtaining the funding. Thanks so much for telling us more about your business and we'll have a further conversation in our moderated panel. But next up, we're going to take you all the way from Minnesota to Maine and look at a new company, bluetrace, that's attracted a lot of customers and work with different fisheries. So let's hear from Blue Trace from Castine, Maine.

Hi, I'm Chip Terry, CEO and co founder of BlueTrace. We're based in Castine, Maine. And I knew a lot of folks who'd gotten into the oyster farming business. I love what they were doing. It's so cool and it's so cool on so many levels. The community aspect, like these are real jobs in for really hardworking people on the coast of Maine, which you don't see that often. It's also great for the environment. Way too often in these rural areas it's extractive technologies. But sustainable fisheries and sustainable farming is great for the environment and it also delivers an amazing food. I love eating oysters, as do a lot of people. And so the demand is there. I realized their challenge wasn't the actual farming. It was all the record keeping and the operations around the farm to keep that product safe, to make sure that they made money, to make sure that they complied with all the regulations, that the number of things that they had to do was massive. And a lot of these things are things that computers can do a whole lot better. One of the best things I did was I called up a few friends that I'd worked with in the past who I knew were super smart. And I said, I don't know if we're going to make any money at this point, but I got this crazy idea about helping shellfish farmers be better. Would you like to work nights and weekends for nothing? And they somehow said yes. And so I ended up with three co founders who are amazingly talented for a range of different Things, technology, design, product. The things you need to build a really successful business. Thanks to the SBIR program and a really talented team, we built a tied to table traceability system designed for shellfish that's used by over 250 shellfish operations across the country. Our traceability system is based in the cloud. It's accessed via mobile phones. It starts with a harvester who can record their harvest, print out the tags they need to either a mobile or an industrial printer. Also, they'll have landing reports, HACCP blocks and all the other information that they need to make their businesses more efficient. A distributor can then scan that QR code, record receipt of that product and also record shipping and where it went, creating the lot to lot traceability required by regulations. Beyond regulatory compliance, consumers also want to know the story of their food. Fishers and farmers have amazing stories to tell and our system lets them tell that story in a very compelling fashion. The SBIR program has provided a great foundation for our future growth and our strategy is pretty straightforward. Number one, we're going to grow our shellfish network. Every one of our clients buys from and sells to multiple prospects. 60% of our business today comes from referrals and that number continues to grow. Number two, we're expanding to other species. Most of our distributors already work with other species. They're already starting to use us for these products. So we're exploring these markets and how we can expand more fully into lobsters, crab, shrimp, fish and other products. And we're also expanding our solution to help with more of the paperwork, more of the regulatory compliance and just generally, how do we make it easier to be a successful small business in the seafood world? How do we help you find buyers? How do we help you find suppliers? How do we handle recalls, all the things that are drag on these businesses today? Today we have over 250 paying clients in every coastal state in America and we're growing about 180% year over year. And thanks to the SBIR program, we have an amazing foundation from which to build from and thank you to all of our clients.

Erin from Chatham Shellfish Co. Thank you BlueTrace for making my life easier. So welcome. Dr. Chip Terry is the CEO of BlueTrace and it was great to hear more about your company and this portion of the conversation. We're talking about oysters, mussels, clams, making us maybe want to eat some more seafood. But it was great to see the practical ways that your customers, the fisheries, the distributors are using your product. So to me this is A technology not in search of a market, but really responding to a how do you work with your customers Chip, and how have you gotten the traction in the marketplace?

I mean, it all starts by getting close to your customers. I spent the first year starting this out visiting probably 100 different farms, distributors on every coast in the US from the Gulf coast, the Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast, and just really getting to know them and figuring out what the problem is, because I have my assumption. But until you actually get out there, you don't know what they're really dealing with.

So you made a product that seems to be very usable, whether it's out on a boat or whether it's in its application area in a production space. How did you decide what kind of interface to have for it, make it simple enough that it can be used by a very broad audience?

A lot of it goes to my team. I come at this as a person who grew up on the coast of Maine, knew a bunch of fishermen up there, but have spent the last 20 years developing software products in the Boston market of different types. And the number one reason that software products don't get adopted is usability. So I found a couple of co founders who are really good at usability, folks I've worked with in the past who are super smart. Call out to Andy, Kat, Drew, you guys are amazing. And it's being able to iterate quickly and make those evolutionary changes that you need to make it usable. Because the thing to understand about the seafood industry, and this may be true in a lot of ag tech, is that frontline workers, it's probably 100% year over year turnover. The companies cannot spend amount of time to train people to use a new system. It needs to be something they can pick up and just use without any real training.

And in probably a fairly harsh environment as well. I think of other livestock production, when you're in barns with poultry or whether it's swine, and certainly in fisheries, I would imagine you've got to have something that's durable.

You do. And you know, part of that was, you know, a big part of what we did in the SBR was go through a ton of different printers to figure out which one would work. And you can see this little mobile printer okasis. But you know, figuring out which ones are durable enough, which ones have the right price points, that they are affordable, which ones have the right warranty. So when somebody does inevitably drop it overboard, you can get it covered.

So your product helps with traceability. And that's what some of the SBIR funding I think wanted to address is innovative research. Tell us more about traceability and how the SBIR funding is helping to make that technology a reality.

Yeah. So seafood, unlike some other ag sectors, is defined by a lot of small producers. So just to use the numbers, in the US and Canada, it's 96,000 different businesses that harvest, distribute, process our seafood. And traceability has really two major components. Number one, food safety. How do we make sure that food is safe from the time it leaves the tideline, the time it shows up at your table, that it's cold, chain maintained that it hasn't been adulterated with anything else, that it is the right product. And the second reason is fraud. You guys have probably all heard the stories of a third of fish in a New York restaurant were found to be not the fish that sat on the menu. And this happens all the time and happens at all different levels in the chain. Some of it's incidental, and some of it is intentional. Traceability helps a lot with that. The other thing to understand about traceability is in the seafood market, about 70% of our seafood is imported. About $21 billion a year of seafood is imported. Being able to work overseas and with a simple system that's easy enough for somebody who maybe English isn't their first language, can use the system as well, is really critical.

Great. And you've received NOAA funding.

One other thing I should mention, because I didn't get there, is that traceability systems have often been seen as attacks by all the participants. Oh, I just have to do this traceability because the regulators told me to. What we've worked on is how do we make it so it saves you time, it makes your process more efficient. How do we make it so that you can be a more efficient operation? That's one of the things we really worked on, and NOAA has been incredibly helpful. This is their world. They are the regulators for the fisheries, and they have helped us really understand this world, understand the regulatory environment, and understand the needs of this environment.

Thanks. And allowing us to have the right seafood on our plate. That's exactly what we ordered off the menu. We'll talk more about your SBIR journey as we bring back our other companies. I think they'll be joining us for a discussion. Giannis is back. Edgar's back. Okay, great. So let's talk a little bit more about making a journey as an entrepreneur and how you're able to use different funding sources. So the last session that was on climate was led by somebody in the venture capital industry, you're all having different capital stacks. I loved hearing about Chip really selling to customers, driving revenue with customer traction, but also using Noah to help him work on the technology. Each of you have a different blend of funding. Can you tell us a little bit about it and how those different sources are advancing your business?

Happy to. I guess I'll start, you know, so we've done a combination of sales of, you know, SBIR non dilutive funding and then we also have had some, you know, external input from myself and my business partner, which really together shows not only that we personally believe in the technology and we have skin in the game, but also we're able to move the needle that much farther with the blend of SBIR dollars and some of those pre sales.

Chip, you've raised money and have different sources tell us about it.

Yeah. So obviously the number one source is revenue from clients. If you can have revenue from clients, you're building a business. That's what we're all ultimately aiming to do. Certainly the SBIR funding, I don't come out of a grant background. I didn't expect to raise money, but call out to the main technology institute who sort of said, hey, by the way, you guys should consider this. I have no idea what the SBIR program was ahead of that. We've also raised money and when you go into venture capital, there's lots of different venture capital firms out there, lots of different types. We looked for what is called smart money. Everybody likes to think they're smart, so they're all, they all claim to be smart money, but we wanted people that were in the industry that understood this. So you know, the main venture fund, the Coastal Enterprise Institute, the branch foods folks who really know this industry and can actually help us. Because one of the great things about raising money is now you have a bunch of cheerleaders, you have a bunch of people who want you to be successful and they're going to push you to be successful. That's incredibly helpful.

Yannis, you're in the academic world, although you've had various positions you told us about before. SBIR can be a really good bridge of funding to go from federally funded research inside a university to now transitioning to a company. How has that been helpful for you?

It's critically important for us to receive these awards from the Small Business Administration through NSF and the UST with SBA Earth funds, we launched the company we have been able to have recruiting a team of six engineers and scientists. We largely depended on these funds. Phase One phase two from NSF and the usda. With the traction that we had early on with some animal experiments, we were able to attract funding, R and D funding from large animal health companies. And more recently we have been able to generate some revenue with consulting services, services in biomanufacturing and probiotics related work. As Tip said, the revenue that will be generated is the one most important element of success and criterion of success for business. For a regulated product like ours, it will take four or five years before the FDA actually approves of our product, registers a product and we can generate revenue with that. But we've been able mainly through SBIR funding to bridge the time between academia and revenue generation in the startup.

That's a long term play, as you said, can be really important funding to have in that journey. Each of you are addressing back to the products. You're working on a type of protein and we need more sources and fish fisheries and different sources of aquaculture are part of that. Jan is talking about poultry. Can you tell us a little bit about the trend and where you're seeing growth in the space?

I can start here. Chicken is one of the most climate smart animal proteins. It takes just a pound, 1.7 pounds of soy and corn to make a pound of protein in a chicken. I'll enjoy a soy burger tasting like meat, but more often than not I'll reward myself with the chicken sandwich. And as you said Laura, in the beginning, there is increasing demand for animal protein because of the increasing global population and the increasing standards of living globally. And we have seen a tripling of the demand for animal protein in the last three decades. And it is anticipated that the demand for animal protein will double again over the next two or three decades as the population grows. Seikin does play a critically important role in supplying animal protein. Good, safe animal protein for everyone globally.

Edgar, aquaculture is also seen as one of the opportunities for protein that's more sustainable. Can you talk to us about that growth as an option?

Yeah, absolutely. I think those of us that are in the field to feed the world, we're very concerned about center of the plate. What is the protein on the center of the plate? And that's going to in aquaculture go past salmon and shrimp, which everyone often thinks about. And to do so we need to have aquaculture that's not only responsible, but we have work that's restorative even. Right. It's carbon negative. And there's a lot of opportunity that you're going to see new species that are moving into the aquaculture field. And really aquaculture is somewhat unique because we're going to be reducing pressure then on our native and wild stock, which is absolutely critical as we see more and more of these fisheries crash.

So as we are wrapping up our discussions, I want to talk a little bit more about SBIR and STTR funding and get a recommendation from one each of the agencies. CHIP will go to you on noaa. What's one thing that's best practice you learned from going through the process? One challenge in the process that you pass on to other entrepreneurs? Edgar, I'll maybe have you touch on usda. Giannis, nsf.

I mean yeah, totally worth it. But don't underestimate the amount of time it takes to write up these grants to get the recommendations and get help. I mean for me it was the Maine Technology Institute. A woman named Karen west up there is just amazing. Call out to Karen. But it really helps because I never would have gotten through it without help.

Great Edgar. Working with USDA is an example.

So for me it's finding the critical partners. Right? So bringing together the private and public sector, whether that's universities and obviously the company writing the sbir, but also the partners that you'll take on your customer side that are willing to show pilots and if you can bring together that key group of people, it really will make a great argument for you to fall into the funded side of the equation.

And sorry it was no. Offer your agencies and Yannis any advice for SBIR applicants.

Grant writing can be a painful experience. Don't be ever discouraged by failures. Seek help. The one thing that was really helpful for us was to have letters of support from potential customers just making statements about the possible value of a developed technology for their operations. And that went a long way in convincing reviewers at NSF and and the USDA to fund our application.

So each of these agencies have different rules. As they've all told you, pay attention to the solicitations and find help where you can. As aspiring entrepreneurs that might seek this non dilutive funding sources. Thanks so much for talking to us today. Since I'm in the heart of row crops, it was really great to learn more about aquaculture, fisheries and the poultry industry. So how can they get in touch with you in our last minute? Just go around a little bit of how they should reach out to you.

Sure, folks can reach me at eds2 the number2co.com great tip.

I'm chiplue-trace.com.

Thanks Giannis I'm Giannis@gprobiotics.com thank.

You for sharing your success stories of the growth of your companies and talking to us about the importance of food, agriculture production and topics such as traceability, antibiotic resistance and IoT hardware solutions that will help us improve our production. We appreciate you taking the time to meet with us today.

Thank you. Laura thank you.