Each year, Sacramento Business Journal Inno reporter Mark Anderson identifies the top local startups set to make waves in the year ahead. Pheronym Inc. is one of 11 that made the cut in 2024.
Pheronym Inc.
Davis-based Pheronym Inc. has developed methods to brew up pheromones that can control the actions of nematodes, whose thousands of species are the most abundant critters on earth.
About 20 years ago at the University of Florida, CEO Fatma Kaplan began researching ways to affect the behavior of pest microscopic roundworms by using pheromones, which are external chemical triggers that influence mating and other behaviors.
Not all nematodes are plant pests. “It turns out there are good guys, and there are bad ones,” Kaplan said. The good nematodes attack other insect pests in the soil and infect them with bacteria that either kills them or keeps them from mating.
Pheronym launched as a company in 2018 to commercialize the beneficial traits. Kaplan has managed to keep her ag-tech company Pheronym Inc. doing research and creating products on a shoestring budget with a savvy combination of about $2.2 million in science research grants, incubator space and fellowship opportunities and less than $800,000 in investor money.
The company has four full-time employees and a team of eight people, which includes consultants and contractors. This past summer, Pheronym got a $1 million Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Science Foundation to scale up to commercial production.
Kaplan’s research has taken her across the country, and it has even seen her send nematode research projects into space with NASA.
Pheronym’s product Nemastim uses nematode pheromones to make beneficial nematodes more aggressive and mobile to reach out and attack thrips in soil. Thrips are tiny sucking insects immune to many treatments that damage plants by chewing and also transmitting diseases. Farmers add Nemastim to water and apply it to crops through an existing irrigation system.
The company’s product has been used in successful field trials of its pheromone-juiced nematodes to control thrips, Kaplan said. "We can actually control them."
