Agtech continues to draw new venture capital this year with the latest funding news come from an interesting startup called Anuvia Plant Nutrients. The bio-based fertilizer company just raised $103 million in a Series C funding round that will help it scale production and reach its goal to be in use on 20 million acres by 2025.
Anuvia’s technology is able to transform organic waste into plant nutrients designed to quickly move from soil to plants. Whereas it can take nature up to two years to convert manure into usable nutrients, Anuvia claims its proprietary technology does it in about six minutes. The company uses a proprietary, slow-release nutrient delivery system known as Organic MaTRX, which Anuvia says helps foster improved soil health and crop yield, all while reducing nutrient loss into air and water. What’s more, Anuvia says its products can increase farmers’ ROI by up to five times, while reducing their greenhouse gas emissions by up to 32 percent.
Trial data supplied by Anuvia shows an average yield increase of +5% across corn, rice, cotton, and canola using the company’s SymTRX product as a blend replacement for AMS (ammonium sulfate). Studies on soil health back up claims that the product feeds the soil microbiome and had a nearly 40% reduction in leaching compared to AMS, which rises to an over 50% reduction compared to urea. Approximately 65% of nitrogen in the Anuvia product was released the first two weeks and continued to release at a continuous rate through eight weeks.
SymTRX is already in commercial use on U.S. farms, covering over 1 million acres in 2020, which president and CEO Amy Yoder expects to increase to 3.5 million by next year, and as much as 20 million acres by 2025. They have already secured a deal with The Mosaic Company to produce an exclusively licensed product to be sold as Susterra. Anuvia’s strategic partnership with Mosaic also helped secure a second production facility. Anuvia began using a portion of Mosaic’s shuttered Plant City phosphate production facility earlier this year rather than build a new plant from the ground up.
The company has also forged a strategic partnership with Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest port producer. Smithfield has incorporated Anuvia’s nutrient products into its supply chain. It also supplies Anuvia with hog waste sludge, which is anaerobically digested and then dried, so that the company can incorporate it into its fertilizers. “It’s the circular economy: taking a waste and, rather than throwing it away, being able to harvest what’s important from it and reusing it and revitalizing it,” Yoder said.
Yoder says the company is also looking to grow in two additional ways. One, the company is exploring international growth opportunities. And second, the company is working to develop a “bolt-on” version of its technology that can be added to existing fertilizer plants. Learn more about Anuvia HERE. (Sources: CrunchBase, CropLife, FarmProgress)
