InnerPlant raised $5.65M betting engineered plant proteins beat physical sensors

A San Francisco agtech company that engineers crop plants to emit their own optical stress signals, readable by satellites, drones, tractors or a smartphone camera.

That a safe protein engineered into the plant, emitting an optical signal, would let any camera, drone or satellite read crop stress at field scale.

$5.65M combined pre-seed and seed, led by MS&AD Ventures (the venture arm of Japan's MS&AD Insurance Group).

Shely Aronov and Rod Kumimoto founded InnerPlant in San Francisco in 2018. They began with physical sensors clipped to tomato leaves, then developed a proprietary protein that lets the plant itself emit an optical signal — visible through filters on a smartphone, drone or satellite camera — when it's thirsty, short on nutrients or under pest attack.

InnerPlant debuted its first product, InnerTomato, in 2020. Crunchbase News reported on June 17, 2021 that the company had raised $5.65M in combined pre-seed and seed funding led by MS&AD Ventures, with Bee Partners, UpWest and TAU Ventures participating, to accelerate the business and develop InnerSoy and InnerCotton for larger-acreage crops. In the prior year the team had grown from 10 to 14 people, opened lab space in Davis, California to build a greenhouse, and been granted its first patent with a second pending.

Physical sensors mounted on individual plants cap how much data a company can gather relative to the size of a real farm, which is what pushed InnerPlant toward an optically-readable signal instead.

Making the signal readable by satellites, drones, tractors or a phone camera lets InnerPlant piggyback on collection hardware farmers or partners already have, rather than shipping its own devices.

An MS&AD Insurance Group-affiliated investor led the round because InnerPlant's data has a second buyer beyond farmers: crop insurers, who currently have no comparable real-time signal.

If what you measure can be made to broadcast itself, you can ride distribution that already exists — satellites, drones, phone cameras — instead of shipping your own sensor hardware.

As of the June 2021 funding report, InnerPlant had shipped its InnerTomato product, held one patent with a second pending, and was using the new capital to develop InnerSoy and InnerCotton for larger-scale commercial crops.