Apeel Sciences is a California-based company that’s fighting the $2.6 trillion-dollar global food waste crisis by utilizing advances in materials science to prevent waste in the first place. The company's plant-derived solution for fresh food providers doubles the lifespan of harvested fruits and vegetables even without refrigeration. It develops low-cost, natural technologies to help to eliminate food spoilage, reduce water and energy use, and preserve natural ecosystems. Apeel's private investors and philanthropic partners include Andreessen Horowitz, Viking Global Investors, Upfront Ventures, S2G Ventures, Powerplant Ventures, DBL Partners, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation. Apeel Sciences was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in Santa Barbara, California.
Arable is a developer of an integrated system for agriculture that helps digitize and optimize decisions from seed breeding to food production. The platform measures everything that matters to the crop, from the weather to the soil, to the plant itself by the use of a unique set of spectral and thermal sensors. This enables Arable to observe a crop’s development through the season and determine the onset of stress due to a lack of water or nutrients. Its integrated hardware, agronomic modeling, and software suite is enabling farmers, agronomists, researchers, processors, and food companies to understand the crop system at the plant, field, and region level, which helps to reduce risk, improve productivity, and optimize for sustainability. Arable received recognition, including the Irrigation Association’s Best New Product of 2018, Plug & Play’s Top 10 Ag Tech Companies to Watch in 2019, and THRIVE’s Top 50 Companies for 2020 awards.
Believer Meats, formerly known as Future Meat Technologies, is a cultivated meat company excited to scale to feed the world. Driven by a mission to ensure that all future generations can enjoy real and delicious meat, Believer’s technology and process will make meat accessible and affordable to all.
Benson Hill is a crop improvement company that unlocks the natural diversity of plants and empowers innovators with a revolutionary crop design platform to develop healthier and more sustainable food and ingredients. Benson Hill empowers innovators to develop more healthy, flavorful, and sustainable food by unlocking the natural genetic diversity of plants. Benson Hill’s CropOS platform combines machine learning and big data with breeding techniques and plant biology to drastically accelerate and simplify the product development process.
Brightseed is a biotechnology company that features artificial intelligence that reveals powerful compounds hidden in nature. The company enables a healthier future by illuminating and activating the connections between people and plants. It was founded in 2017 and headquartered in San Francisco, California.