Phylos Bioscience didn’t go away.
The Portland cannabis genetics company, founded in 2014, soldiered on after losing its cool-startup luster in a 2019 PR crackup, and on Tuesday announced a $7.6 million funding round. The money will help boost sales and marketing of its cannabis and hemp genetics, Phylos said.
New York-based Merida Capital Holdings led the raise, and Accomplice and Entourage Effect Capital participated. The new funding brought Phylos’ total VC to $24 million, a spokesperson said.
Merida senior partner Mina Mishrikey got a seat on the board, and the lead quote in Phylos’ news release:
The cannabis industry, relying by and large on cloning techniques, has seen relatively little seed genetics development to date, and that is changing as we speak. Phylos’ next-generation technology will allow cultivators to grow healthier, more consistent crops with amplified, diverse cannabinoid and terpene profiles. We are confident that Phylos is at the forefront of this movement towards a healthier plant and a more sustainable industry.
The statement reflects Phylos’ embrace of its role as a plant breeder with the entity it hatched for that purpose in 2019, Progressive Plant Research, at an 80,000-square-foot Hillsboro facility. Phylos employs about 40 people between its Portland HQ and the Hillsboro site.
Phylos on Tuesday described a range of advances in the past couple of years, including development of “ground-breaking low-touch, high-yield, and disease resistant early maturation Cannabis seed genetics for commercial-scale grows.”
Previously, Phylos was known for mapping cannabis genetics on its public “Phylos Galaxy” map, which got written up in The New York Times. Its revenue streams were in providing plant sex and genotyping testing services to cultivators, and with an explicitly anti-Big Ag vibe. (Explicitly in more ways than one: Founder Mowgli Holmes famously said, “We … hate Monsanto,” employing a gerund that begins with the letter “f.”)
The move into breeding brought accusations of betrayal from growers who had shared plant material with Phylos, which they suspected the company would use for its own competitive benefit.
Holmes, who exited in 2020, said the material would be of no use. Phylos copped to botching communication of its breeding-program announcement, and assumed a lower profile as it built out the Hillsboro operation. Last year, it stopped doing the plant sex and genotyping testing.
The company on Tuesday included this statement in its news release:
Phylos will continue its commitment to collaborate with breeders through royalty-bearing licensing deals to ensure they're fairly compensated for their dedication to the advancement of Cannabis and hemp, protecting IP to promote innovation and support funding research to further knowledge of the Cannabis genome. The company also provides no-cost technology licensing for academic institutions and non-profits, specifically for research purposes.
