The second cohort of an agriculture technology accelerator has brought Silicon Valley-based companies to Alabama.
HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, in partnership with global venture firm and startup accelerator gener8tor, will host the second AgTech Accelerator showcase June 22 at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville.
The event will include the five startup companies that will present their work – Terra Bioforge, Khepra, OmniVis, SAVRpak and Bloom Labs. Founders will have the opportunity to pitch their companies to investors, community partners and the public.
The five companies were selected for the spring 2023 cohort of the HudsonAlpha AgTech Accelerator. The 12-week accelerator began in April and invests $100,000 in five startups at the forefront of the agtech industry.
The concierge business accelerator connects startups with a program team, a global community and regional resources from both HudsonAlpha and gener8tor. Participating founders also receive individualized coaching along with access to gener8tor’s national network of mentors, customers, corporate partners and investors, to help them secure customers, accelerate their revenue growth and attract additional funding.
The latest cohort was selected from hundreds of applications from around the world.
Terra Bioforge, based in Middleton, Wisconsin, has pioneered a synthetic biology platform for the overproduction and discovery of bioactive natural products that are beneficial to humans, plants and animals. Plant pathogens cause billions of dollars per year in crop losses worldwide, a problem the company aims to solve by engineering beneficial microbial strains that replace chemicals.
Khepra, based in San Francisco, is a manufacturing platform for chemicals that is fully electrified and aims to enable low-cost production of bio-derived alternatives. A spokesperson from the company said petrochemicals cause pollution with negative impacts on human and planetary health, and Khepra is trying to solve this by decoupling petroleum from the chemicals supply chain.
OmniVis is a company with a goal of eliminating food-borne illness in the U.S. Based in San Francisco, OmniVis created a handheld device to detect food-borne pathogens from the industry standard of three days, to under 30 minutes, which can potentially save facilities costs associated with downtime due to food-borne outbreaks.
SAVRpak, based in San Juan Capistrano, California, leverages thermodynamics to fight condensation. The technology is a bid to keep food fresher longer, helping fight food waste. SAVRpak is a technology born of aerospace and defense technology.
Bloom Labs, based in New York City, is trying to accelerate the transition toward a circular economy. It offers a way to catalyze the value in waste by regenerating it as bioplastics and textile fibers.
