St. Louis biotechnology startup Pluton Biosciences has raised $6.6 million in seed funding to advance its product development efforts.
The startup said the financing was led by Oakland-based venture capital firm Better Ventures. Other investors include the Grantham Foundation, Fall Line Capital, First In Ventures, Wing Venture Capital and St. Louis-based Yield Lab Institute.
“With this new round of capital, we’ll be able to build Pluton’s value as an innovative force, providing solutions to the climate and agriculture challenges of our time. Credit goes to the leadership and science team who generated the results to make this all possible,” said Pluton founder and Chief Scientific Officer Barry Goldman.
Founded in 2017, Pluton has developed a process, called micromining, that it says allows for inexpensive examinations of microorganisms in soil samples to discover new bacteria, fungi and viruses. The 15-person startup, led by CEO Steven Slater, has focused on developing natural products designed to mitigate climate change and reduce the use of synthetic chemicals in agriculture.
Pluton’s fresh funding follows a research agreement it inked earlier this year with Germany-based Bayer to use its technology to develop soil microbes designed to store carbon and nitrogen. The microbes will be deployed through a spray product that would be used by growers. The startup says its research has found the microbial-based product could capture about 2 tons of carbon from the air per acre of farmland on an annual basis.
The seed funding is one of several milestones reached by Pluton, which has been selected for several prominent accelerator programs, including two based in Silicon Valley. In 2020, Pluton expanded with the acquisition of Microbe Inotech Laboratories, a commercial research and testing lab in Maryland Heights.
