cultivate new agtech startups that can address global farming problems, and to help them commercialize their innovations and bring them to market. San Diego’s Finistere Ventures founded Radicle, with support from the private equity firm Cloud Break Advisors; Israel’s OurCrowd; Bayer (Ticker: [[ETR:BAYN]]); and DuPont Pioneer.
Radicle raised $6 million last year to make seed-stage investments of up to $500,000 in agtech startups primarily in five regions: San Diego; Silicon Valley (Palo Alto, CA); North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park; parts of the Midwest; and Israel. The accelerator plans to announce its first portfolio companies by the end of March, Haney said.
The accelerator plans to raise another $10 million for its venture fund this year, Haney added.
Radicle adopted a virtual model for its startup program because “time is the enemy,” Haney explained. The point of an accelerator is to transform the speed of getting a company to success. “Bringing 30 entrepreneurs to San Diego to teach them how to do P and L [profit and loss] statements and cap tables would take too much time,” he said. “If we’re going to give a company a half-million dollars, I want that entrepreneur focused on hitting milestones, and not worrying about where they’re going to send their kids for school.”
Radicle is focused on making seed stage investments in startups that specialize in digital agriculture (i.e. technology that generates and analyzes farm data); new biological compounds for plants; hydroponics and other innovative farming systems; and certain aspects of food technology.
The accelerator recruited Pyle and other industry veterans as mentors to help deepen the technical and business expertise that Radicle provides. “They’ve raised capital. They’re problem-solvers and big thinkers, and they have their own networks of VCs and other people that we don’t,” Haney said.
Pyle, for example, has described himself as a technology developer and entrepreneur who is focused primarily on transferring breakthroughs in academic research to industry. He specializes in areas that are crucial to startup companies, such as research management, technical project planning, organizational development, intellectual property development, and R&D timeline and resource planning.
Radicle, meanwhile, has centralized most business tasks for its portfolio companies. Haney said its online platform can provide accounting and finance, marketing and public relations, and other services. By managing many of the necessary business tasks that frequently distract entrepreneurs, Haney said, Radicle’s program can help startup founders maintain their focus on advancing their respective technologies.
“Fields of Corn” image by Michael Pardo from Flickr’s creative commons public domain.
