Other investors included Grantham Foundation, Astanor Ventures, Acre Venture Partners, Anthos Capital, Thia Ventures, Emerson Collective, as well as the farmer-led Ag Ventures Alliance and others.
Nitrogen fertiliser is an expensive yet essential crop nutrient, supporting the food supply of half the world's population. Current manufacturing is largely based on fossil fuels and leads to over a gigaton of CO2 equivalent emissions and many damaging environmental consequences such as fertilizer run-off and eutrophication. Switch Bioworks engineers symbiotic, nitrogen-fixing microbes that live on plant roots to replace conventional fertilizer, a solution that is carbon-neutral and lower-cost.
"Not many people realise that their food is grown with fossil-fuel-based fertiliser. If we want to decarbonise our economy, we must find new ways to provide crops with nutrients," said Kartick Kumar, Managing Partner and CEO at Change Forces, the new spinout climate fund from King Philanthropies. "The team of talented biotechnology experts at Switch have assembled from around the world to develop an innovative approach that dramatically improves the performance and cost-effectiveness of biofertilisers, tackling a significant climate challenge."
"Making nitrogen fertiliser with biology is something that scientists have tried to do for 50 years," said founder and CEO of Switch Bioworks, Dr. Tim Schnabel. "What's been limiting the efficacy of biofertilisers is that as soon as microbes are engineered to make fertilizer, it's so energy intensive that they are no longer able to compete with native microbes in soil and on plant roots. That's a problem, because if your microbes get outcompeted in a matter of days, they can't make a meaningful amount of fertiliser over the crop growing season. At Switch, we're pioneering a 'switchable' engineering approach that enables microbes to first compete and establish themselves on plant roots before switching on fertilizer production."
The first product Switch Bioworks is developing will be a consortium of diverse symbiotic microbes, where each member is engineered to release nitrogen fertiliser under precise genetic control. Applied at planting using existing farmer practices, Switch's product will cost less than the conventional fertiliser it replaces, helping farmers improve their bottom line – fertiliser is one of the biggest operating expenses of farming.
Since the potential benefits of switches go beyond nitrogen, the company has developed a modular platform of switches that can improve the performance of many precision-engineered biological products and is actively building R&D and product development collaborations in the agriculture and biotech industries.
The ten hottest years on record have all been in the last ten years, highlighting the urgent need to decarbonise the global economy quickly. With the addition of a pre-Seed round raised in 2022 and grants from organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Switch Bioworks has now secured over $25 million in support of its mission of feeding the world sustainably. This latest financing will be used to complete product development of the company's first carbon-neutral biological nitrogen fertiliser, including initial scale-up fermentation and formulation as well as greenhouse and field trials in the U.S. and internationally.
