Agtech Accelerator Radicle Recruits Industry Vets to Mentor Startups

Fields of Corn (Flickr public domain image by Michael Pardo)

Former Sapphire Energy CEO Jason Pyle is one of four agricultural technology veterans who have agreed to advise the startups taking root at Radicle, the San Diego-based accelerator focused on agricultural and food tech ventures.

Radicle named Pyle, who is now the CEO of BaseHealth, a Silicon Valley healthtech developer of analytic software, as a venture partner in a statement released last week. The agtech accelerator also named Paul Zorner, CEO of Locus Agricultural Solutions; Sam Fiorello, COO of the Danforth Plant Science Center; and agribusiness veteran Tom Urban as venture partners.

Pyle was unavailable last week to discuss his role at Radicle. But managing partner and CEO Kirk Haney said in a phone interview that the venture partners’ role “is to help us mentor these early stage ventures to success.”

Jason Pyle

Pyle came to prominence in San Diego as the founding CEO of Sapphire Energy, an industrial biotech that set out to advance technology for extracting crude oil from algae. Sapphire raised at least $321 million from investors that included Arch Venture Partners, the Wellcome Trust, Arrowpoint Partners, Monsanto Growth Ventures, and Bill Gates’ Cascade Investment fund. Pyle left Sapphire in 2012, as it became apparent that the oil industry’s use of fracking was undermining the economic basis for developing algae-based gasoline and other biofuels.

Under Jamie Levine, who stepped in as CEO in 2014, Sapphire Energy is now focused on developing algae-based products for health and nutrition.

Haney, who was CEO of the San Diego biofuels crop company SG Biofuels, observed that many cleantech veterans who were focused on energy have shifted their focus in recent years to agtech. Advances in plant genomics and industrial biotechnology have made the sector ripe with opportunities, Haney said.

Radicle, as Xconomy’s Frank Vinluan explained last June, is a virtual accelerator program intended to

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.