Monsanto Growth Ventures releases portfolio details

The venture capital arm of Monsanto, Monsanto Growth Ventures (MGV), released its investment portfolio details for the first time last week, revealing MGV has a variety of active companies in many areas including agricultural productivity, digital agriculture and biologicals.

“Entrepreneurs are more engaged with the food and agriculture sector than ever before,” John Hamer, MGV's managing director, said. "We believe MGV provides collaborative access to one of the most innovative agriculture companies, as well as deep venture capital experience within our team.”

MGV has almost a dozen companies and more than 50 co-investors in its growing portfolio. All of the companies are independent companies and MGV’s role is as a minority shareholder.

“We see tremendous potential for transformational advances in agriculture, which is why we are collaborating with Monsanto Growth Ventures to boost startups like Plant Response Biotech,” Scott Horner, managing director with Middleland Capital, a co-investor with MGV, said. “We have a front-row seat for innovation, and it’s encouraging to see both industry leaders and the investment community rally to support it.”

The companies in MGV’s portfolio include companies that coincide with Monsanto’s integrated systems approach. Among the investments are agricultural productivity companies Arvegenix and Nimbus-Ceres. In the area of digital agriculture, AgSolver, Vital Fields, HydroBio and Blue River Technology can all be found in MGV’s portfolio. Finally, the biologicals companies found in the portfolio are Preceres, AgBiome, RaNA Therapeutics, PivotBio, and Plant Response Biotech.

“Working with Monsanto Growth Ventures has brought significant value to our firm as we chart our next phase of growth and look into moving our robotic machines from vegetables to row crops,” Blue River Technology CEO Jorge Heraud said. “Having a partner with global reach that is willing to make introductions opens doors for us. I’m excited about our ability to take our technology to more places than we could have done alone.”