InnerPlant acquires $5.65m. funding with participation from TAU Ventures
TAU ventures is the first university-based venture capital fund in Israel, according to its website.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFTEL AVIV UNIVERSITY, home of the Boris Mints Institute for Strategic Policy Solutions to Global Challenges(photo credit: CHEN GALILI)
InnerPlant, a company pioneering ideas and developments of living plant sensors, has received $5.65 million in funding with participation of Tel Aviv University ventures and other companies, a press release stated on Friday.Nimrod Cohen, managing partner at TAU Ventures, said: "InnerPlant has real potential to become a large company which will impact one of the biggest problems in the world."TAU Ventures is the first university-based venture capital fund in Israel, according to its website. Founded in 2018, InnerPlant has a set goal of assisting farmers by developing genetically adapted living sensors to grow plants more sustainably. This would cut farmers' reliance on pesticides and fertilizer. InnerPlant also adds safe proteins to enhance certain plants' capabilities, so when plants are thirsty or short of nutrients, they generate different optical signals that can be seen in daylight using common optical filters on multiple different devices.InnerPlant's funding is led by MS&AD Ventures, and with these new investments, can provide opportunities to develop products from plants for crop risk management and food supply chains. “Enabling crops to express their needs finally brings the data revolution to the farmer’s field in a way that fits with how they’re already working,” says Shely Aronov, CEO and founder of InnerPlant.“Rather than installing hardware across fields, farmers continue planting crops the way they always have and our platform pulls data directly from individual plants," Aronov continued.
