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By Agroempresario
Avalo, an innovative startup utilizing interpretable artificial intelligence (AI) to develop climate-resilient crops, has successfully raised an $11 million Series A funding round. This investment will be used to accelerate the development of crops that require fewer inputs such as water and nitrogen fertilizers, beginning with cotton and sugarcane. The company also announced an exciting new partnership with Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) to secure the sugarcane supply chain and reduce scope 3 emissions. This partnership represents a major step in the integration of advanced technology into agriculture, offering a promising solution to some of the most pressing challenges in crop production.
The Series A round was co-led by Germin8 Ventures and Alexandria Venture Investments, with notable participation from CCEP, Trust Ventures, Trailhead Capital, and angel investor Will Canine. Existing investors AtOne Ventures, Better Ventures, SOSV, and Climate Capital also played a crucial role in supporting Avalo’s growth. This influx of capital will enable the North Carolina-based company to deploy its unique rapid evolution platform, which uses AI to breed crops that are better adapted to the challenges of climate change.
The focus of Avalo’s technology is to accelerate the breeding of crops with improved resilience, requiring fewer natural resources. According to Nicola Tongue, CCEP Ventures representative, the partnership with Avalo aims to address one of the hardest-to-abate emissions areas in the value chain—ingredients. By tackling the issue of sustainability at its core, Avalo’s innovations have the potential to reduce scope 3 emissions while adding significant value for growers and stakeholders along the supply chain.
The collaboration between Avalo and CCEP will focus on improving the sugarcane crop, which is known for its heavy reliance on water and fertilizer, and its limited growing regions. Traditional breeding methods have struggled to make meaningful progress in enhancing sugarcane resilience due to the crop’s complex genetics and long breeding cycles. Avalo’s technology, however, promises to break these barriers by developing sugarcane varieties that can grow with less water and nitrogen fertilizer, potentially future-proofing the sugarcane industry for farmers and producers alike.
In regions like Australia, where the sugarcane industry faces significant challenges due to runoff from nitrogen fertilizer and escalating drought conditions, Avalo’s approach could have a transformative effect. The company aims to introduce new sugar varieties that thrive in harsher conditions, preventing further damage to vital ecosystems, such as the Great Barrier Reef, and ensuring a more sustainable future for sugarcane farmers.
The typical process of bringing a new sugarcane variety to market can take over a decade. Avalo’s advanced AI platform, however, could slash this timeline by more than half, enabling the company to introduce new, resilient varieties in just 5 to 6 years. This rapid breeding process could change the entire landscape of agriculture by providing farmers with more resilient and sustainable crops in a fraction of the time it traditionally takes.
At the heart of Avalo’s success lies its groundbreaking AI technology known as Gene Discovery by Informationless Perturbation (GDIP). Developed based on Professor Cynthia Rudin’s work in interpretable artificial intelligence, GDIP allows Avalo to rapidly identify the genes responsible for specific traits in plants, such as disease resistance, drought tolerance, or other value-added traits beneficial for the supply chain. CEO Brendan Collins and Dr. Mariano Alvarez, who co-founded Avalo in 2020, believe that the new AI approach offers unprecedented insights into plant genetics.
Collins emphasized that while traditional AI models used in agriculture often struggle with sparse data, particularly for crops other than maize and soy, Avalo’s approach focuses on interpreting limited genetic information with high precision. This ability to use less data while achieving better results sets Avalo’s technology apart from other agricultural innovations.
In conventional breeding, the most common technique used to link genes to traits is the genome-wide association study (GWAS). This method scans plant genomes for markers associated with desired traits and helps breeders identify regions likely responsible for those traits. However, as most agricultural traits are polygenic (controlled by multiple genes), GWAS can be inefficient and imprecise. Avalo’s AI-driven model, on the other hand, uses machine learning to analyze the entire genome simultaneously and identify which genetic regions are most strongly associated with specific traits.
According to Dr. Alvarez, this approach allows Avalo to more accurately predict which genes are most important for certain traits, even when those traits are controlled by hundreds or thousands of genes. By using machine learning to evaluate the entire genome at once, Avalo’s system is able to offer more reliable predictions about plant performance, making breeding programs much more efficient and cost-effective.
Avalo’s AI technology not only improves the accuracy of genetic analysis but also dramatically accelerates the breeding process. Traditional breeding techniques may only identify causal genes for 15% to 20% of the traits being studied. Avalo’s model, however, has a success rate of over 90%, ensuring that the genes identified in the breeding process are more likely to produce tangible results.
This increased accuracy and efficiency offer a significant advantage to farmers and growers, who can expect faster and more predictable results when incorporating Avalo’s technology into their breeding programs.
Avalo’s business model is centered around collaborating with large companies to create crops tailored to specific supply chain needs. In its partnership with CCEP, Avalo is working to develop low-nitrogen, low-water sugarcane varieties that can reduce the beverage giant’s scope 3 emissions. By developing these specialized crops, Avalo not only meets the needs of corporate clients but also provides a valuable opportunity for farmers to grow these crops with reduced environmental impact.
For farmers, Avalo offers seeds at discounted rates, along with agronomy support to ensure optimal growing conditions. The company then helps farmers harvest the crops and sell them into the commodity supply chain, sharing profits with them. This model benefits all parties involved by promoting sustainability, increasing profitability for farmers, and helping companies like Coca-Cola meet their sustainability goals.
Avalo’s focus on sugarcane is just the beginning. The company has ambitious plans to expand into other crops, including cotton, rubber, and rice. For instance, Avalo is developing a low-nitrogen, rain-fed cotton variety that can thrive even in the face of severe droughts, a crucial innovation for states like Texas, where droughts have devastated cotton crops in recent years.
Additionally, Avalo is exploring the use of dandelions for rubber production in Ohio, and the development of fast-growing broccoli varieties that could allow farmers to harvest up to six times a year, offering significant economic benefits and reducing the need for pesticides.
Despite the current skepticism around agtech investments, Avalo’s partnerships with major companies like CCEP signal strong market interest in the potential of AI-powered agricultural innovations. Michael Lavin, managing partner at Germin8 Ventures, believes that Avalo’s ability to leverage AI to rapidly identify and harness important genes will revolutionize the agricultural supply chain.
According to Lavin, Avalo’s AI-driven approach will break down barriers on the farm and transform the industry by enabling the commercial release of varieties designed for society’s most pressing needs. The company’s ability to reduce breeding timelines from decades to just a few years is set to make it a major player in the global agriculture market.
Avalo’s goal is to have its first machine learning models trained by the end of this year, with the expectation that the company will start making recommendations by early next year. As it continues to refine its technology, Avalo aims to make a significant impact on the agricultural supply chain over the next three to five years, ultimately leading to more sustainable crops and farming practices that benefit the environment, the economy, and global food security.
