Prime Movers Lab Releases Venture Trends in Agtech Primer

Agriculture is the foundation of civilization. No industry touches more lives, and no industry’s success is more critical to our continued flourishing. Modern agriculture is a story of incredible success, enabling unprecedented increases in food production and population growth, but the industry faces the daunting challenge of feeding the global population (projected to grow to 10 billion by 2050) in the midst of a worsening climate crisis. This presents a dilemma: many of agriculture’s most successful practices accelerate climate change, yet it’s the industry perhaps most vulnerable to the near-term impacts of climate change; in other words, the measures needed to sustain current crop yields threaten future yields in a worsening negative feedback loop. Fundamental changes are needed to navigate these challenges.

Fortunately, innovators at the forefront of science are pursuing new solutions to address the most urgent needs in agriculture. Because Prime Movers Lab’s core goal is investing in breakthrough scientific startups with the potential to improve billions of lives, focusing on the opportunities that exist in agricultural technology (agtech) is a natural fit. This primer begins with a high-level overview of the state of agriculture today and the problems it faces, then breaks down the emerging technological solutions to those problems and explains our investment theses in those areas.

Read the entire primer by Research Fellow Andrew Short here.

Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in seed-stage companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.