AgStart and Bayer Crop Science are offering startups in agriculture and food science free laboratory space for a year in the LifeHub California Golden Ticket competition.
The winner could be a local startup, an entrepreneur coming off a local college campus or an international company looking for a place to land in California, said John Selep, president of the AgTech Innovation Alliance, the nonprofit sponsor of the AgStart business incubator.
“Bayer is interested in opening the top of the funnel to discover innovative companies and ideas,” Selep said. The competition “is sort of an experiment to find new companies, and it will also elevate our stature.”
The winning company will get a lab bench in the Lab@AgStart, a coworking laboratory for startups in Woodland.
The Lab@AgStart opened in 2021 in 5,000 square feet of space in an office complex at 1100 Main St. in downtown Woodland. The space featured about 26 laboratory benches and a variety of lab equipment, instruments and items needed for a laboratory space as well as meeting rooms, offices and public areas. In January 2022, the Lab@AgStart opened an 8,000-square-foot expansion, the Bayer Lifehub California@AgStart, which included 26 more laboratory bench spaces, as well as a fermentation lab and a separate tissue culture lab.
The winner of the Golden Ticket will get space in the Woodland lab paid for by Bayer. Bayer Crop Science is the seed, biologics and crop protection unit of German multinational chemical and pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG. Bayer also operates a major seed development lab just down the road from Woodland. Bayer is developing one of its LifeHubs in extra space in that facility, but that new LifeHub won’t open until later this year or next year.
This Golden Ticket competition could also find potential candidates for that new lab space when it opens.
At the Lab@AgStart as well as its new LifeHub, Bayer tends to support the startup ecosystem, Selep said. Before it sold its nearly 170,000-square-foot lab in West Sacramento, Bayer sponsored a CoLaborator shared lab space inside its own offices to offer startups access to equipment.
The Golden Ticket competition welcomes startups from anywhere in the world. They can be focused on regenerative agriculture, novel crop protection and efficiency approaches, advanced breeding technologies and applications of synthetic biology.
The Lab@AgStart has been a landing spot for at least three international companies to begin lab work in California, Selep said. The companies are responsible for getting their own visas. The availability of lab space is one attraction for international and domestic companies, and another big attraction is access to more than 100 seed and agriculture technology companies in the region, along with the research at the University of California Davis.
"Our greater Sacramento region is home to the University of California Davis, the top research institution in the country for agriculture and forestry, and it anchors California’s Central Valley region, home to one of the largest and most productive agricultural regions in the country, with a focus on high-value specialty crops," said Lucy Lu Roberts, director of business development in ag and food for the Greater Sacramento Economic Council, a regional economic development group.
The link for startup companies to apply is https://www.halo.science/startup_program/lifehub-golden-ticket.
