Elemental Enzymes formed two strategic partnerships – one this week — with big AG companies to get a couple of its products to market.
Brian Thompson, Ph.D. Elemental Enzymes CEO
“We’ve developed a technology you can apply to plants and these plants will not only have increased vigor and health, but they will also have resistance to drought,” CEO Brian Thompson Ph.D. told the 4thEst8. Strategic partner Corteva will “bring the kind of ‘tail end’ of it, which is really the marketing, positioning the product, and really having the reach to the growers directly. We’re a fairly small Missouri company, and we can innovate, make products — but they’re really the ones who are going to bring it out there so growers can actually access it.”
Elemental Enzymes identifies and productizes naturally occurring enzymes to counter disease, promote growth, or address other crop health and productivity issues. It sprang out of the University of Missouri in August of 2011, has 40 full time employees (85% are scientists), and is headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri.
The other strategic partnership, about three weeks ago, was with Nutrien. They are taking to market a peptide-based product that Elemental Enzymes developed. It’s designed to address the ‘citrus greening’ disease that is devastating Florida’s citrus trees.
“It’s infected all of their acres, basically killing all of the citrus, and that’s their ‘star’ industry,” Thompson said. “This is a biological, sustainable solution that you can apply to these trees and they really bounce back. They put out more leaves, more oranges… it’s a great product that’s going to come out next year.”
Business history:
Following an initial angel round, the company has been eating what it kills: securing contracts to fuel business growth. That’s something Thompson says he’s proud of.
“We put our energy towards product development right away instead of fundraising… we have products on millions of acres in the U.S. We’re one of the few ag-biotech companies that have gotten to this point without any venture funding,” he said, adding that an initial deal with Bayer CropScience got them off the ground. As for an exit “I think we’re growing so quickly that we’re not interested in exiting at this point. We have a very nice trajectory ahead of us, so we’re gonna ride this thing for a while.”
Corteva, Inc. (NYSE: CTA-A) is a major American agricultural chemical and seed company that was the agricultural unit of DowDuPont prior to being spun off as an independent public company in February 2018.
Nutrien (NYSE: NTR) is a Canadian fertilizer company, based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, that was founded in 2018. It is the largest producer of potash and the third largest producer of nitrogen fertilizer in the world with more than 1,500 retail stores.
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