A member of the top 100 from the Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist
John Hamer took charge of agriculture business Monsanto’s corporate venturing unit within Monsanto Growth Ventures (MGV) at the end of 2012.
This was a year after Stephen Padgette assumed his current role in Monsanto’s global strategy group in 2011 as vice-president for R&D investment strategies, including corporate venturing and biological business startups.
Earlier this year, MGV revealed its portfolio as stage-agnostic, investing from seed to later-stage in developers of technology related to the pharmaceutical, chemical or consumer sectors. It said it had led or co-led all but two of the 11 investments it had made in startups.
The unit’s digital agriculture portfolio includes US-based land management software provider AgSolver; Blue River Technology, a US-based developer of software that organises weeding and herbicide application; US-based irrigation recommendation platform HydroBio; and Estonia-based farm management system developer Vital Fields.
MGV has funded two companies developing agricultural productivity technology, investing in Arvegenix, a US-based startup modifying field pennycress into a cover, energy and feed crop, and Nimbus-Ceres, a US-based agricultural fungicide joint venture with biotechnology company Nimbus Therapeutics.
Other portfolio companies include US-based biological chemical product developers Preceres, AgBiome, RaNA Therapeutics and PivotBio, and Plant Response Biotech, a Spain-based startup working on products and microbes to improve crop yield and health.
Before he was investment director at Monsanto, Hamer was a managing director at Burrill & Co for nine years and was chief executive of Arete Therapeutics and Paradigm Genetics. He was a professor of biological sciences at Purdue University and a visiting scientist at DuPont. He has a PhD in microbiology from University of California Davis, and studied biology and biological sciences at University of Windsor.
