Building and Scaling in Agricultural Biotech

Sophia Tabibian (00:00): Welcome to the Climate Map podcast. The Climate Map, an initiative founded by Covalence Global, outlines the complexities of climate change on a streamlined, action-oriented mind map. This podcast is an archive for our research, highlighting conversations with entrepreneurs, scientists, and policymakers.

Sophia Tabibian (00:17): My name is Sophia Tabibian, and I'm your host and the co-founder of Covalence Global. I'm joined here today by Ameer Shakeel, co-founder and CTO of AgroSpheres. In this episode, we discuss Ameer's entrepreneurial journey in building and scaling an agricultural biotech company.

Sophia Tabibian (00:32): Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from, and what is your educational background?

Ameer Shakeel (00:38): I was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, where I was for most of middle school through high school. And then after high school, I got into the University of Virginia. Then I came to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, to start biomedical engineering. Outside of school, I loved playing soccer and horse riding. Those are some hobbies that have still continued. And I'm still in Charlottesville, Virginia. I came here first in 2013.

 Sophia Tabibian (01:06): Nice, so how did you meet your co-founder? What were your original ambitions at the University of Virginia, and how did they change as you learned more about biotechnology?

 Ameer Shakeel (01:17): I think my initial ambitions may have been to become a soccer player. But you know, things change over time. I think when I entered university, all I really knew was that I liked biotech, and I liked engineering. So I liked biology and I liked engineering, applying something to something. Both me and Payam, we were in the biomedical engineering program. He was a year ahead of me. We got connected at this lab, and we were both trying to do a research project where we had come across this really cool technology, and we wanted to develop it for pesticide degradation.

Ameer Shakeel (01:53): Initially, we just wanted to do something cool in the lab. But then we started doing some research and started coming across the detrimental health effects of pesticide exposures. And I personally knew about that from some of my heritage in Pakistan, big agriculture economy, similar for Payam from being from Iran. That was the initial motivation behind the project, so then we started developing this technology that degrades pesticides. And the thought was that farmers could apply it in the field at the end, just to make sure all the harvest was pesticide free.

Sophia Tabibian (02:30): That's very cool. I didn't know that you and Payam were in two separate grades, so it's even more interesting that you connected even when you weren't the same graduating class. Tell us about your experience at the Collegiate Inventors Competition in 2016. Why did you decide to participate, and how did this sort of kickstart your work at AgroSpheres?

Ameer Shakeel (02:52): So we started our research, I think somewhere in our second year. At that point, you know, we were very young, we didn't really know where it would go. But towards the end of our third year, starting my fourth year, it was very clear that we had developed something really powerful, and that could actually have a lot of impact. I would say even us as students, we were surprised like, wow, I know we started this, but now we actually have something and we didn't really ever think about what are we going to do from here. Because when you first get started, you're just thinking about doing it, we're not really thinking about what are we going to do in terms of planning and next steps. So at that moment, you know, we actually had this technology that was really powerful. And we had very limited resources apart from a very small lab bench that our co founder professor was letting us use. We didn't have any resources in terms of a place where we could go work, etc, etc.

Ameer Shakeel (03:46): My fourth year, or our last a couple of years, we went on a competition tour across the US, where we were just entering these student entrepreneurship competitions, these technology pitch competitions, and just trying to raise some funds for the company. The Collegiate Inventors Competition was one of those competitions that we went to with that mindset of, okay, let's get some resources behind AgroSpheres. But when we got there, it was probably the most unique such event we had gone to, because we got to meet gold medal winner technology inventors, USPTO Hall of Fame inductees, I met the inventor of the camera, and then also the inventor of the CO2 laser. And just spending time with these people was really inspiring, because despite them having done incredible things, what they spoke about was people, family, friends, quality time. So that was, you know, a very human moment for us that, okay, I know, we're really passionate about this one thing, but we have to always remember that the impact with people and the society around it is perhaps more important.

Sophia Tabibian (04:58): Yeah, that's a really good point. I know that when you move from the hard science world to actually deploying that science and bringing it to market, you see so much more of that intersection between technology and society, which I think can be something very powerful. Since your launch in 2016, what are some of Agrosphere's key milestones? What does your role as co-founder and CTO look like in achieving those milestones?

Ameer Shakeel (05:26): There's been so many that I'm trying to pick which ones would be, well, I guess I'll give you a few different themes. First, let's start with the intellectual property, which has been a very interesting journey. So we filed all of our intellectual property, if I recall correctly, in 2016, leading into maybe 2017. And we have four broad patent families, very broad around the technology. As kids, you know, as very young students, 2016 -2017, we had filed a quite broad IP of our technology applied to agriculture, because we were truly the first to be doing it. The closest thing to our tech was derivatives in pharma, but even that was quite different, so meaning our landscape of industrial and agriculture was really broad.  So we filed this IP, and we thought, first exposure to IP. I thought, you file it, okay, it's done. No, that's not actually how it goes. So from there, I'll tell you the first significant thing that happened was 18-ish months after we filed our IP, and about six months after it becomes public, we started seeing copycat IP popping up from companies in Boston, mostly, and here and there, and companies who had a lot more resources than we did, companies that were maybe multi -billion dollar companies. That was the first key point in our IP journey, and maybe that started happening in 2019. So then after that, basically 2020, they started getting prosecuted, and you start having to justify why your IP, it predates it, et cetera, et cetera. And then finally, in, I would say, starting 2022, is when it finally started getting granted around the world. So I think the IP was a very big milestone that, although we filed it, in 2016, 2017, maybe some new IP in 2018 as well, it only started getting granted in 2022, maybe late 21. So it takes at least four or five years for IP to get granted. So I think that's been a key milestone, just establishing that AgroSpheres has all this broad IP on the technology we're building, so that really protects us and gives us freedom to operate within our field without worrying about other people trying to steal our technology. That was one big milestone, the IP side.

Ameer Shakeel (07:45): The second one has been the technology development. I think we've developed our technology from just a very small lab bench, where we couldn't produce enough of it where we could see it on a macro scale. Starting with the inception, doing some science, having some indications in lab with just numbers, and then actually scaling it and bringing it to a very physical form. We were producing it in kilogram quantities, going out to farmers. Farmers are using it right before our launch, and they're liking the product. Just that evolution of the technology from an inception to a physical use product in terms of spraying in the fields. I think that's been another key milestone, how far the technology has come.

Ameer Shakeel (08:29): And perhaps the third one I would say is the funding behind AgroSpheres. Because it's essential, I call that a milestone as well. I think now we have quite significant revenue and also very good investor funding. I would say in the tens of millions of dollars for an annual budget for a biotech company, those are decent resources if you're smart with them and you can actually build more. I know it's a small budget, but for a biotech company, it's enough for us where, you know, we started with very little. So now we know how to put these resources to work.

Sophia Tabibian (09:05): I would say scaling and funding are two things that I hear a lot in the entrepreneur world, but IP is just as important. And I guess you don't hear it as much in companies that aren't so science-based, but I think it's so interesting. I mean, it took you four to five years to even follow through with it, that must have been a long time of wait. And now shifting more to the technology side, how has your biodegradable encapsulation technology pivoted over time? And what makes your technology and epistemology different from your competitors?

Ameer Shakeel (09:41): The platform technology was essentially this way of engineering microbial cells with normal DNA. It was a way of engineering those cells to divide without the DNA. That results in this very small cell that doesn't have any DNA, but the advantage of that is it is no longer a living organism. It doesn't have any DNA, so you're not releasing genetic information into the environment, but you can still retain the protein, the RNA, the metabolite, any such biomolecule that the parent cell produced. You can retain it in a very stable form because it has this cell membrane around it. It's a very nice delivery vehicle without the DNA contamination. The first application we had was putting enzymes in it to degrade pesticides. Since then, now we put proteins, RNAs, and metabolites for crop health and crop protection. The biggest pivot had to do with just from the user perspective of the farmers did not want to apply chemicals to start with. They said instead of giving us something to clean them up, give us an alternative to these chemicals. So I think that was the biggest pivot, but since then it's been steady progress in developing these different branches of the technology. One of the important decisions that we tried to make was finding those early commercial opportunities and making our pipeline such that we have some early products in market, and some medium term, and some long term. So building that pipeline.

(Sophia Tabibian 11:12): That's very cool. I think that also demonstrates how important it is to go to your customers and ask them for feedback and iterate based on that feedback. That's something that I think a lot of companies need to do more of, which AgroSpheres clearly did. How have you incorporated an entrepreneur's perspective into your scientific background, and why has this perspective been important to scaling AgroSpheres's impact?

Ameer Shakeel (11:39): I think being in the entrepreneurial arena, where you come across a lot of people who identify as entrepreneurs, I think I've come across a lot of different mindsets. Whenever we started doing AgroSpheres, to be honest with you, we were never familiar with the term entrepreneur. I would say early on when I was meeting people who identified as entrepreneurs, I was also learning and seeing, you know, what does this term mean? What are these people doing? And most of the definitions I feel like are the thinking patterns I came across. I wouldn't say I had the most alignment with. So over time, what my realization has been that entrepreneurship, for me, means being very patient, persistent, and taking both the positive outcomes and negative outcomes, and making something productive out of them, and doing things in the real world. That's another thing of, you know, you can poke the world and study it and see how it behaves. So I think that's been very important for us because in AgroSpheres, there have been definitely many ups and downs, there's challenges along the way, which is the nature of building any kind of company, there will always be challenges along the way. So navigating those challenges with patience, persistence, and then a lot of trust in the team around me. I think that's been some of my learnings from the entrepreneurial journey.

Sophia Tabibian (12:58): I like those too, patience and persistence. And I recently read about your Series B funding. Congratulations on that. As you said, funding is such a big part of the process. So that must have been a huge milestone to hit. And I understand that you plan on releasing your first product by this year. So as a B2B business model, what types of farmers do you plan on first deploying your technology to?

Ameer Shakeel (13:27): Yes. We are just knock on wood. Ideally, we are a couple of weeks away from full EP approval, which is the last milestone we're waiting for from the regulatory side. And the EPA's worked tremendously hard with us and done their best to try to make it as fast as possible. The first way we are going to market is in agriculture, the sales channel is very consolidated. It's either distributors or the big companies that you go through. That's the most productive way for a small company, at least when you're getting started. We have a very good partnership with this California based distributor company called Wilbur Ellis. They will be distributing our products to vineyard owners, any kind of thing to do with grapes, table grapes, wine grapes, strawberries, tomatoes, almonds. So these specialty fruit and vegetable crops. Those will be the first arena farmers to access our product. And typically for those kind of crops, California, Oregon, Washington, those are some of the biggest states. We will be hitting those states hard to start and then hopefully trickle from the west coast to the east coast.

Sophia Tabibian (14:37): I also was reading an interview with AFN that you had, and you emphasized the value of a perspective of building bridges from the developed world to the developing world. What does this mean to you and how do you hope to achieve it through AgroSpheres?

Ameer Shakeel (14:54): This has been a big part of my personal AgroSpheres journey is, you know, I feel like the first two years after college, when I was working on AgroSpheres, I forgot about, you know, building any kind of bridges. Honestly, I was just like, we have to make AgroSpheres work, and everything else a second, you know, deprioritizing, seeing family, close friends, stuff like that. But then I'm very glad that only after two years, I realized that, you know, maybe there's never that one destination you reach where you're like, okay, then I can start building these bridges, you have to do it along the way. I think both myself and Payam, we are fully aligned on this. The culture we built at AgroSpheres itself with the hiring. We started from five people, now we're at 35, maybe even close to 40, maybe include some external sites. We used to call it family, but now we call it sports team. We treat it more like a team now because everyone needs to perform. But within that, the kinds of initiatives we have to look after the personal lives of the people who work at AgriSpheres as well. And there's been wide ranging instances of, you know, I don't want to get into any specifics, but for example, helping people buy a house, helping them relocate, they may be needing some time off to visit family overseas, which you can just take a few days off for you know, anything along that spectrum. That's been a very big focus of ours, and helping people with immigration as well. So we've tried to do a lot there in terms of building those internal bridges first. That's what we've been doing.

Ameer Shakeel (16:24): But then the ultimate goal is to actually build those bridges from the Western world to the Eastern world in terms of economic development and giving access to technology that improves people's lives, so that is the long-term goal we are working towards. But along the way, you know, what I realize is there's a lot you can do in local communities as well, along the way.

Sophia Tabibian (16:46): I really like that, especially those internal bridges, because I know that your team is pretty international, and I think that can be a lot of value in itself. In terms of looking forward, what is your future vision, long-term or short-term, for AgroSpheres, and potentially how can our listeners stay updated with that vision?

Ameer Shakeel (17:08): Our future vision is that modern farming, I'll start with the past, I feel like there was a time when we did not have enough food to feed everyone. We solved that problem, but the way we solved it with chemicals and unsustainable solutions is really putting the health of our planet at risk, human health at risk, and having truly very unsustainable and detrimental impacts across the board, whether it's draining the layer of soil, the fertility of the ground, or you know, the exposure to chemicals that all of us have had, given that most of the food is exposed to chemicals. I think transitioning away from that to more of a personalized agriculture system, not for every farm, but you know, maybe for different segments of the world. Of the US even, you have different biological solutions that interact with the environment in more productive ways, in healthier ways. For example, RNA technologies are able to do that. They're sequence specific, play on epigenetics, different regions of different epigenetics. So I think that is our vision of a more sustainable way of growing our food while we also take care of our people and the planet. I think that is our ultimate vision.

Sophia Tabibian (18:17): That's awesome. To close off, I mean, you've shared so many great insights, but is there anything else you'd like to share?

Ameer Shakeel (18:24): I think just that it's very important to have fun while you're doing it and really be careful about the team you build. So those are some very important things to keep you going.

Sophia Tabibian (18:34): Those are great. Well, thank you so much, Ameer, for your time. I'm very excited to share all the things that you've said with the Covalence Global community. And I think this is going to be a great way to bring AgroSpheres to a new audience.

Ameer Shakeel (18:50): Absolutely. Thank you very much.

Sophia Tabibian (18:51): And that is it for the Climate Map today. Please visit the the-climate-map .org to learn more about how you can get involved with us.