Last year's Inno Madness competition pitted 16 New Mexico startups against each other in a friendly, bracket-style competition. Readers, through four consecutive weeks of voting, picked which ones should advance through each round of the contest, eventually settling on one champion — ag-tech startup Terra Vera.
As this year's competition gets ready to kick off, New Mexico Inno caught up with Terra Vera to see how things are going with the Albuquerque-based company almost one year after it was voted as your 2023 Inno Madness champion.
Read more about Terra Vera and a new market opportunity its CEO thinks could lead to big growth in the years ahead below, and get ready to vote in the first round of this year's contest later this week.
One of the most harmful threats to agriculture in the U.S. and worldwide is a mite —specifically, the Varroa destructor, a type of external parasite. Varroa mites feed and live on honeybees and their larvae and pupae, decimating bee colonies that play important roles in honey production and pollinating different plants and flowers.
So, when Albuquerque startup Terra Vera discovered its amino acid-based germicide technology could not only help keep plants safe from disease but could also kill soft-body pests — just like the Varroa mite — its CEO Carlos Perea saw an opportunity.
There are over 100 million beehives worldwide, with a growing number of both commercial and hobbyist beekeepers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture shows honeybees pollinate $15 billion worth of crops in the U.S. alone each year and produce millions of dollars worth of honey.
For Terra Vera, those numbers represent a potentially massive market for the startup's agriculture — and, now, apiculture — technology, Perea said.
"We've never seen a market that's told us we need your product this much," he told New Mexico Inno.
Evolved from its existing amino acid crop protection and nutrient products, which use biomimicry-based technology, Terra Vera's bee-specific tech isn't ready for that bee market yet. While the startup has shown the new product works through testing at the University of California, Davis, Perea said the company's next step is talking with commercial and hobbyist beekeepers to see exactly how they could incorporate the technology into their operations.
The startup also wants to hire a honeybee industry expert to help commercialize the bee-focused product. After trialing the product in the field, Perea said it could be ready for full market release in three to six months.
But readying the bee product isn't a full pivot, Perea said. Rather, he called it an "extension" — one Terra Vera hadn't anticipated a year ago.
"We're responding to the market," Perea explained.
"I look at it like any business," he continued. "There was a day when the auto manufacturers made very few trucks and a lot of cars, and then all of a sudden they don't make almost any, they make all trucks. That's just what the market told them. The market has told us we need to be in the bee space."
There's also a "moral" component to the new technology, Perea said, because of how important bees are to "our ecosystem."
"If we really started the company to replace toxic chemistries in agriculture, bees are a part of agriculture," Perea said. "We just didn't know that the problem was as big or as acute as it is."
While Terra Vera has prepared its honeybee product for market rollout, Perea said the startup's existing plant-based market has grown. That includes more customers in the ornamental plant space, he said.
Terra Vera, which Perea co-founded in 2020 alongside CTO Justin Sanchez and Kathryn Radovan, the startup's senior vice president of business operations, focused initially on the cannabis cultivation market, working with growers like Roswell-based Pecos Valley Production and Eugene, Oregon-based SugarTop Buddery.
The startup has since expanded to more plant customers outside the cannabis market, and Perea said Terra Vera could grow its plant-based market by around 35% this year. Its revenue grew by about 40% last year, and he expects the startup's revenue to grow by two to three times that in 2024.
But once the bee product is ready, the bee market could eclipse the plant market "within a year" and grow much faster, Perea said.
As part of Terra Vera's expansion in 2024, Perea said the startup is looking to raise $1.5 million in a "bridge" round and is inviting some new investors to join. That round would be in preparation for a "much larger" round later this year, he said, money that would be used to fuel Terra Vera's bee market expansion.
That expansion over the next several years, Perea said, could include a glut of new employees. The startup currently employs eight people.
"I really want to see us create a monumental shift in what's possible in New Mexico," he said. "I think the only way we get there is by having a company that isn't just about getting big and getting to a couple hundred employees, but really is trying to change an industry."
