Last week, we wrote about a Medford startup that pulled in a whopping $102 million to bring sustainable biopesticides to market.
Today, a new agtech startup with a similar promise launched with $66 million in its pocket. Backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Woburn-based Enko Chem is using AI to find new molecular compounds to make pesticides sustainable and safe.
The company announced on Friday that it has raised $45 million in Series B funding led by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and brought on Finistere Ventures, Novalis LifeSciences, Germin8 Ventures and TO Ventures Food as new investors.
Enko was founded in 2017 by former Flagship Pioneering executive Jacqueline Heard. The company's founding investors include Anterra Capital, a Boston-based venture fund that invests in companies focused on health and nutrition, and Rabo Bank's Food and Agriculture Fund.
The startup's launch comes as the need for pesticide alternatives and crop protection becomes more pressing. Just this Wednesday, German pharmaceutical giant — and the parent company of Monsanto — Bayer agreed to pay $10 billion in a lawsuit settlement that linked the popular herbicide Roundup to cases of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
“Resistance issues have been plaguing agriculture production for years, but the industry has been slow to innovate. Delivering safer, lower use rate products that provide good returns for farmers needs to be the rule and not the exception,” said Heard in a statement. “We are leveraging powerful drug discovery technologies to build a deep pipeline of solutions at unprecedented speed as we strive to lead this $60 billion industry into a new era of sustainable agriculture.”
