Shiri Ailon, head of M&A and ventures at Syngenta Group, is one of the 100 leading corporate venturing professionals in our 2025 Powerlist.
Before joining Syngenta Group Ventures in 2020, Shiri Ailon spent 15 years at Adama Agricultural Solutions, an Israeli crop protection subsidiary of Syngenta Group. “I came from mergers and acquisitions and then got the opportunity to lead Syngenta’s venture activity, which was a new and exciting journey for me. It is deal-making, which I have always loved, but very different to the M&A process,” says Ailon.
“I joined a very professional team and learned a lot about the technologies within agriculture and food technology. Now, five years later, I feel our unit has found a way to balance and maximise the financial and strategic values of our investments to our parent company.”
The Syngenta Group Ventures team includes four deal leads – two covering the Americas and two covering the rest of the world. Typical cheque sizes range between $1m and $10m per round.
“I feel our unit has found a way to balance and maximise the financial and strategic values of our investments to our parent company.”
“We invest in the core of what we do – crop protection, seed breeding, biologicals. But we also have the prerogative to invest in technologies that are core adjacent. For example, we invested in biologicals many years ago, before it was part of our core and that foresight has made it part of our core business now,” says Ailon. “The idea is to identify mega trends early on and make our business units aware of them,” she says.
The unit has 18 companies in its portfolio, including Greeneye, an Israeli precision spraying company, Agrolend, a fintech company offering loans to Brazilian farmers, and nutrient use efficiency startup Sound Agriculture.
Despite challenging economic conditions, Syngenta Group Ventures is continuing to invest. “We want to be perceived as a partner of choice for startups and to be in the right position to capitalise on the expected industry rebound,” says Ailon. “We are in a downcycle and the geopolitical conditions are not easy, but the fundamental need for agtech innovation, as well as our conviction in our corporate VC activity, remains stronger than ever.”
Powerlist represents the 100 individuals spearheading the future of the corporate venturing industry.
These individuals excel in terms of their venturing approach and structure, number and quality of portfolio companies and in their contributions to the corporate venturing profession.
