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- Pivot Bio, a synthetic biology company working on nitrogen-producing microbes, announced yesterday that it has completed a Series B round of financing totaling $70 million led by Bill Gates’ innovation investment fund, Breakthrough Ventures.
- Though Temme says the company is “technology agnostic” on genetic engineering tools, it’s made a decision to pass on transgenic technology, which is one way in which it differs from Joyn Bio, another company working on nitrogen-fixing microbes.
Breakthrough Ventures is a $1 billion fund with famous investors like Gates and other high-profile billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. The fund focuses on innovation aimed at addressing different areas of environmental concern, with recent investments in a company working to decrease carbon in the concrete industry, a group working on a nuclear-fusion reactor that could produce net-positive energy and, in the agriculture space, the investment in Pivot.
Pivot plans to invest the funding in bringing its first microbial product to market in 2019, but the company also has future plans—exploring new markets like Canada and Brazil, as well as funding research into a seed treatment application and moving beyond just corn to add microbial products for crops like wheat and rice.
The company was founded in 2011 after receiving a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates has a well-documented track record in supporting agricultural innovation, as the Foundation funds the Cornell Alliance for Science, an agriculture-focused educational effort, and many other agricultural projects throughout the world.
Pivot is a new startup located in Berkeley, California, but it has ties to traditional agriculture and the Midwest, too. Monsanto Growth Ventures was an early investor, and it’s worked closely with Midwest corn growers to test its microbes in the fields.
Karsten Temme, cofounder and CEO of Pivot, says the company has its sights set on “corn, wheat and rice [because we know] those three crops consume half of the world’s nitrogen.” The company’s goal—reducing fertilizer dependence—has both environmental and economic benefits, because less money spent on fertilizer means more for the farmer at the end of the growing season.
Farmers need that economic incentive because their margins are so narrow. “Every farmer out there, you get one shot...every year...your financial health, the ability to pay the bills or feed your family, it all depends on [your] success,” explains Temme.
Pivot’s first microbial product, now branded under the name Proven, is sprayed into the soil at the same time that the farmers plant the seed. Once the seed is planted, the microbes attach to the epidermis of the corn’s root where they then begin to colonize, eventually forming a continuous nitrogen feeding loop with the plant. That feeding loop is what reduces the need for nitrogen from fertilizer.
Pivot sees itself as restoring the microbiome’s potential, arguing that crops like wheat, rice and corn lost the ability to fix nitrogen because of synthetic fertilizer and its impact on microbes. Adds Temme, “we've supplemented...with fertilizer, and it’s meant that we’ve left the microbiome behind.”
Pivot scientists’ first job then was to find the best microbes for the job of “spoon-feeding” nitrogen to corn plants. Once those microbes were identified, scientists fine-tuned them so that they wouldn’t shut down in the presence of fertilizer, but instead could keep fixing nitrogen for the plant. “Our goal,” says Temme, “[was] to be able to simply unlock what’s already present in the microbes’ own genome and and turn these genes back on.”
Though Temme says the company is “technology agnostic” on genetic engineering tools, it’s made a decision to pass on transgenic technology, which is one way in which it differs from Joyn Bio, another company working on nitrogen-fixing microbes. “We’ve made a decision as a company that we don’t want to produce a transgenic product,” Temme says, because industry and consumers alike seem to be moving in the other direction. It also means less regulatory hoops through which the company must jump, though that could, of course, change in the future.
Pivot is also further along in development than Joyn, since Pivot was founded in 2011 and Joyn is just over a year old. Joyn hasn’t begun field trials, for example, but Pivot has already given its product to a number of farmers to use in their corn growing operation.
And Pivot has results. Says Temme, “we’ve done studies with academic partners [who] quantify that our microbes are producing about 25 pounds of nitrogen per acre, [which means,] depending on where you are, and what your crop needs are, that could be 10-25% of the nitrogen you’d apply.” More nitrogen from microbes means the plants needs less fertilizer.
Those are the stats from Pivot’s first generation microbial product, says Temme, adding that the second-generation product that’s currently in development will do an even better job. Temme hopes Proven will one day eliminate the need for synthetic fertilizer altogether: “There’s a direct path to being able to make that the primary source of a nutrient for your crop.” Of course, that claim is several years away from being put to the test, but eliminating the need for fertilizer altogether would certainly be an industry disruption.
