Fatma 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.
Kaplan has been artful in her ability to put together backup plans that offer the company lab space for free or very low rates.
Pheronym 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. Kaplan’s grandparents and parents were hazelnut farmers in Turkey, so she grew up understanding the problems pests pose to agricultural production.
About 20 years ago at the University of Florida, 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.
Kaplan is also still working with pheromones that send signals to pest nematodes so that they avoid attacking food crops. Pest nematodes, especially root-knot nematodes, can attack some 2,000 plant species worldwide, and they account for 5% of global crop losses.
Kaplan’s research has taken her across the country, and it has even seen her send nematode research projects into space with NASA, which is studying successful ways to feed astronauts with fresh foods in space or even on Mars.
Kaplan came to California with her company in 2017 to participate in the IndieBio program in San Francisco put on by venture capital firm SOSV. That gave her access to lab space in San Francisco. When she completed the program, she went looking for new lab space. That’s when she found a fully provisioned wet-lab bench space available at the UC Davis-HM.Clause Life Science Innovation Center south of Davis. The company moved into that lab in 2018, where it remained until it was one of the first companies to take shared lab space in the Lab@AgStart in Woodland.
“If it hadn’t been for the HM.Clause incubator, we wouldn’t have been able to make it,” she said.
Then starting in June 2021, Pheronym got free lab space in the Department of Energy Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as part of its two-year Cyclotron Road Fellowship. The lab space is hosted by the University of California Berkeley.
During that fellowship, Pheronym worked a few days in Berkeley and a few days at the Lab@AgStart. With the Berkeley fellowship over, Pheronym recently moved everything into the Lab@AgStart.
“It was very helpful to have the lab space in Berkeley, and we saved a lot of money, but it feels good to be back in one lab," Kaplan said.
The company has four full-time employees and a team of eight people, which includes consultants and contractors. Kaplan is now looking to add two full-time positions, which will be funded by the most recent funding, a $1 million Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Science Foundation. That grant is to scale up to commercial production.
“She’s been very creative in getting a lot of recognition for what she’s getting done through fellowships and grants,” said John Selep, president of the AgTech Innovation Alliance, the parent of Lab@AgStart.
Kaplan says it has been a challenge as a female founder to raise investor money, but she’s still working on it. She holds three patents, but investor money has been hard to find.
“As a founder, you know when the money is going to run out. What you don’t know is when the investor money is going to show up, so you must have multiple backup plans to be able to keep working,” she said. She’s always working on backup plans, she said.
Pheronym’s first target market will be combating thrips, a pest that is a problem in agriculture globally and that has become resistant to chemical pesticides. Thrips, tiny sucking insects, damage plants by chewing and also transmitting diseases.
Pheronym uses nematode pheromones to make beneficial nematodes more aggressive and mobile to reach out and attack thrips in soil, often in greenhouses. Farmers add Pheronym’s product, called Nemastim, to water and apply it to the crop, either by the tanks they already use or through an existing irrigation system.
The company’s product has been used in successful field trials of its pheromone-juiced nematodes to control pests, she said. "We can actually control them."
The company is moving up in size in its production. Some of its early trials were in small shaker flasks. It moved up to 7-ounce flasks on a workbench. It is now moving up to bioreactors that work in 5- to 10-liter quantities.
Pheronym is also in talks with two companies in the U.S. and two in Europe for access to even larger bioreactors for commercial delivery, she said.
The Essentials
CEO, Pheronym Inc.
Age: 50
Education: Master’s and Ph.D. in plant molecular and cellular biology, University of Florida, 2004; bachelor’s degree in agricultural engineering from the College of Agriculture at Cumhuriyet University, Sivas, Turkey.
Career: CEO and co-founder Pheronym 2012; lecturer, University of Florida, 2012-2016; science researcher, USDA Center for Medical, Agricultural and Veterinary Entomology, 2008-2012; researcher, National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, 2005-2008; researcher in data science with NASA at Kennedy Space Center, 2004-2005.
Personal/family: Married, three teenage children. Lives in Davis.
