Woodland-based plant genomics analysis company MyFloraDNA has raised nearly $1 million to expand its operations and customer base, which is starting in the cannabis industry.
The 2020 startup company is up to 15 employees, about half of whom work in the laboratory Lab@AgStart, an incubator for agriculture and food technology startups in Woodland.
“We are growing fast, we are gaining a reputation and we are getting new customers for genetic analysis,” said CEO and co-founder Angel Fernandez.
Using just a tiny bit of a baby plant’s first leaf, MyFloraDNA can analyze whether it will be a male or female adult and determine if it has disease or other weaknesses. And it can get that information back to the grower in days.
That means growers don’t have to spend weeks, or even years, waiting to see how seedlings work out.
The benefit for the grower is that they can find out in a few days which plants, for example, will be male or female. In the case of cannabis, growers prefer female plants. In normal growing, it takes 16 weeks of growing to determine the sex of the cannabis plant.
For growers, they can choose early on which plants to grow and which to cull.
“They don’t have to water them, fertilize them, grow them and they don’t occupy space,” Fernandez said. “It saves them money.”
MyFloraDNA eventually plans to offer its service to nut tree and orchard fruit farmers, who now have to wait years to determine the nature of their new plants.
The company started with cannabis because it is a high-value crop, and it is a plant line that lags behind other crops in research and science. Federal and state laws for decades banned research on cannabis and hemp strains.
MyFloraDNA only needs a tiny bit of the first leaves of a plant, called a cotyledon. Those leaves are actually part of the seed.
From that tiny cutting, the company can determine the sex of the plant and other qualities the mature plant will exhibit. And in the case of cannabis, those cotyledon leaves don’t have any THC or CBD, the chemicals that growers are eventually seeking, but which are in many cases not supposed to be sent through the mail.
In most cases, MyFloraDNA sends growers about 100 vials, and the growers put the leaf material in the vials and send them back. The company tests them and posts the information on a secure website within 24 hours of receipt.
Fernandez is a plant geneticist at the University of California Berkeley, and he did his postdoctoral research in bioinformatics at the University of California Davis.
MyFloraDNA's revenue grew from $45,000 in 2020 to $180,000 last year, which convinced investors in Spain and the Bay Area to add money to the company, Fernandez said. The funding was a combination of debt and stock-purchase warrants, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
MyFloraDNA started out working in the labs of the Life Science Innovation Center, which is operated by UC Davis and HM.Clause in Davis. MyFloraDNA quickly outgrew that incubation space and expanded to the newly opened Lab@AgStart last year.
The Lab@AgStart quickly filled up in its first year, and it is now in the process of expanding because of an ongoing high demand for lab space in the region.
