Agrivida reaps $15m in Series C funding

Presidio Ventures, backed by Japan’s Sumitomo industrial conglomerate, and Syngenta Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of US crop company Syngenta, have helped Agrivida, a company that develop biotechnologies for agricultural and industrial processing, raise $15m in Series C round funding.

Agrivida’s crop technology, Intein Trait, produces crops with enzyme expression for the production of biofuels and bioproducts from non-food agricultural residues and dedicated biomass crops.

The Series C round is led by Bright Capital, the venture capital unit of Russia’s RU-COM Group. Other investors alongside Presidio, Bright and Syngenta included  Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, DAG Ventures, Prairie Gold, Gentry Venture Partners, Northgate Capital and Alexandria Real Estate Equities. In 2010 Syngenta licensed some of its technology to Agrivida in return for a stake in Agrivida..

In January 2009 Agrivida closed its Series B round at an undisclosed size from venture capital firms DAG Ventures, Northgate Capital Group, Presidio, PrairieGold Venture Partners, incTank, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield, & Byers. It received its first round funding of $600,000 in 2007.

Agrivida will use the Series C financing to advance the development and commercialisation of its proprietary technologies. Mark Wrong chief executive officer of at Agrivida, said: “The financing will enable us to continue the development and commercialization of our proprietary INzyme™ platform, which will allow our partners to produce non-food biomass with properties customized to enhance specific chemical processes, including generation of cellulosic biofuels and other related products, within existing infrastructure”.