Key Sentence:
- Karsten Temme is a student of bioengineering at the University of California.
- San Francisco when he began researching how plants could self-fertilize with nitrogen to eliminate the need for synthetic fertilizers.
That’s a big idea – synthetic fertilizers are known to be harmful to the environment, but farmers rely on them to reliably sustain the growth and yield of their crops – and one that scientists have shunned for decades.
In 2011, he and his lab assistant Alvin Tamsir launched Pivot Bio, backed by a grant from the Gates Foundation, to turn this research into a commercial opportunity. For a decade, the Berkeley-based California company had tens of millions in sales (Temme declined to provide specifics) for microbial products that could replace synthetic fertilizers in large grains, including corn and wheat.
In a sign of how ample the opportunity is, Pivot Bio said Monday it has raised $430 million, led by risky DCVC and Singapore’s Temasek Holdings. The new investment will fund agricultural technology start-ups to more than $600 million with an estimate of nearly $2 billion.
“I don’t think there’s ever been anything like this on the farm,” Temme’s 41-year-old boss said of his massive cash flow. “We’re starting to see where innovation can change sectors within the industry.”
Temme, who grew up in Casper, Wyoming, received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biomedical engineering from the University of Iowa before moving to California to earn his PhD. In the laboratory of Professor Chris Voigt, an early pioneer in synthetic biology and now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he decided to investigate whether plants could be made for self-fertilization.
“The concept of fertilizing plants has been around for more than 100 years,” he said. “I was naive enough to focus on this impossible agricultural problem.” With Pivot Bio, Temme and Tamsir reconstructed DNA into microbes in the root microbiome so that the reprogrammed microbes could recognize the nutritional needs of plants and produce the right nitrogen content for them.
They essentially reactivate the long-lasting nitrogen-producing abilities that are already present in soil microbial DNA. “It’s been hibernating since we started using fertilizer,” he said. “We said, ‘Let’s build this part of the microbiome again.’ “