Kansas City-based Vytelle, which developed an innovative in vitro fertilization platform for livestock, has harvested a $13.2 million oversubscribed Series A round.
The round was co-led by Open Prairie through the Open Prairie Rural Opportunities Fund, Ag-tech VC and Fulcrum Global Capital. Also participating in the round were local investors Innovation In Motion and KCRise Fund, as well as Serra Ventures and existing investor, UK-based Wheatsheaf Group.
“It’s a really big milestone for us as a company,” Vytelle co-founder and CEO Kerryann Kocher told the Kansas City Business Journal. “We’re really looking to expand and are excited about the validation and the commitment from our investors to do just that.”
Vytelle, which employs 90, hired 43 people this year and is looking for 20 more in operational roles, such as finance and recruiting, as well as lab technicians, veterinarians and those specializing in data science, bioinformatics and quantitative genetics.
Over the last four years, Vytelle has captured 20% of the IVF embryos market in the U.S., Kocher said, and has cattle producer customers in 21 countries. Vytelle also secured the largest beef producer in the U.S. as a client, said Caroline VanDeusen, a principal with KCRise Fund.
“KCRise is inspired by Vytelle's mission to address the worldwide protein demand not only with science but also with data-driven technology to increase both production and sustainability,” VanDeusen told KCBJ. “CEO Kerrryann Kocher comes from a rich background in animal science and has the talent to address this global problem head-on.”
The precision livestock company developed an integrated technology platform that uses breakthrough IVF technology as well as an animal performance data capture system and an artificial intelligence-based genetic analytics engine. Vytelle can help cattle producers accurately identify the elite performing animals with the best genetic traits to pass on, and it uses a non-hormone IVF approach, which eliminates the need for additional labor.
The company addresses what it describes as “the triple challenge,” which is producing more meat and milk in a more sustainable way while ensuring producers remain profitable, Vytelle Global Marketing Communications Manager Danielle Starr told KCBJ. A cattle producer, for example, could choose to breed two top bulls with a top cow. But instead of waiting nine months for one calf, the embryos can be implanted in multiple surrogate cows, which makes reproduction faster and more efficient.
Vytelle’s technology can identify the cattle with desirable traits, such as reaching market weight faster, which leads to using less water, food and other resources.
“We want to ensure that milk and meat are viable food choices for future generations, and to ensure they’re viable, we have to be able to produce them in a more sustainable way,” Kocher said. “Genetics are a permanent and compounding solution to sustainable production, so we make that accessible to producers to actually solve for this problem.”
A bulk of the Series A funding will be used to add 15 more labs over the next five years to produce embryos for cattle farmers. The money also will be used to add new hires and enhance the company’s AI analytics tools. In the next five years, its goal is to secure 25% of the embryo global market share.
