Shely Aronov, CEO and founder of InnerPlant (courtesy)
InnerPlant, a pioneer in the development of living plant sensors, today announced the completion of a $5.65 million pre-seed + seed financing round led by MS&AD Ventures, the investment arm of the Japanese titan MS&AD Insurance Group, with participation from Bee Partners, Up West, and TAU Ventures.
The investment paves the path for the development of new solutions that use data directly from plants to control agricultural risk and food supply networks.
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Farmers worldwide are confronted with unprecedented challenges as a result of dramatic climate change, while also attempting to increase food production to feed a growing global population. Farmers are resorting to prophylactic pesticide use as a result of these issues. Crop yields become more unstable as a result, putting a strain on the value chain and service providers such as insurers that mitigate risk for farmers and the entire food supply chain.
Founded in 2018 by Shely Aronov, InnerPlant achieves its extraordinary data flow by exploiting plants’ inherent defenses. To protect themselves from external pressures, plants have evolved sophisticated defense mechanisms. InnerPlant capitalizes on these signals by augmenting plants’ capacities with a safe protein that has been extensively tested for human use. When plants are thirsty, deficient in nutrients, or attacked by pests or fungi, they create a variety of visual signals that can be detected in daylight using ordinary optical filters on devices ranging from an iPhone or tractor to a satellite.
Farmers regularly lose up to 20% of their harvests to diseases that could have been managed earlier and with more targeted, plant-specific interventions. InnerPlant’s approach of gathering data directly from plants and processing it with complex algorithms provides plant-by-plant status that is impossible to obtain with external sensors.
“By enabling crops to communicate their requirements, we can finally bring the data revolution to the farmer’s field in a way that fits their existing practices,” explains Shely Aronov, CEO and founder of InnerPlant. “Rather than deploying hardware across fields, farmers continue planting crops as usual, and our platform collects data directly from individual plants to provide farmers with insight into stress levels, allowing pesticides and fertilizers to be applied only when necessary.”
TAU Ventures managing partner Nimrod Cohen: “We are delighted to support Sheli and her extraordinary endeavor from the start. Innerplant has the potential to grow into a substantial corporation that will have a significant influence on one of the world’s most pressing issues. and the sky is the limit with Sheli.”
