Indigo Agriculture

About

Indigo Agriculture develops microbial seed treatments and operates digital platforms—grain marketplace, carbon-credit program, agronomy and transport logistics—to connect growers, buyers, and soil carbon measurement and verification.

Mission

Indigo Agriculture builds microbiology products and digital platforms for agriculture, including Indigo Marketplace, Indigo Carbon, Indigo Transport, Digital Agronomy, and Indigo Microbials. The company says its scientific discoveries and digital platforms benefit tens of thousands of growers across millions of acres. Indigo Marketplace has completed over $1B in transactions since launching in September 2018. Indigo established the Terraton Initiative in 2019 to draw down one trillion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide through agricultural soils. The company plans to use new capital to scale and integrate its core lines of business and accelerate efforts to improve environmental sustainability, farmer profitability, and consumer health. Indigo is headquartered in Boston, MA, with additional offices in Memphis, TN; Research Triangle Park, NC; South America; and Basel, Switzerland. Indigo operates digital platforms and biological products to create new value from soil to sale, most notably Indigo Grain Marketplace and Indigo Carbon (part of The Terraton Initiative). The Grain Marketplace is an ecommerce platform that connects farmers directly with buyers and has enrolled over 10,000 growers and nearly half of all U.S. buyer facilities. The marketplace saw month-over-month transaction growth of 50–100% during the second half of 2019 and, since its public launch in September 2018, has had over $300 billion worth of bids placed. Indigo Carbon provides financial incentives to growers to enrich soils and has drawn more than 14 million acres of grower interest since its June 2019 launch; the company is deploying technology to measure, monitor, and verify soil carbon. Indigo says it will leverage new capital to scale these platforms, with a stated goal of generating positive operating cash flow near the end of 2020 and for full-year 2021. The company is headquartered in Boston, MA, with additional offices in Memphis, TN; Research Triangle Park, NC; Sydney; Buenos Aires; São Paulo; and Switzerland. Indigo Agriculture makes microbial seed coatings for corn, soy, wheat and cotton that aim to improve drought, heat, saline and low-nitrogen tolerance while boosting disease and pest resistance and crop quality. Its research claims corn yield uplifts averaging 45% (about 32 bushels/acre) in low-rainfall regions, with increases up to 77% in some areas, and wheat protein improvements. Indigo has filed over 250 patents and says it has sequenced genomes of more than 40,000 plant microbes, investing tens of millions of dollars a year in internal R&D and operating a data and software platform to study performance variables. The company uses a contract model in which it supplies seed to farmers and purchases their harvest at a guaranteed premium, offering roughly $0.47/bu for corn and $0.43/bu for wheat (about a 10–15% premium). Indigo plans to expand its product portfolio into new crops, continue microbe research and roll out its business model across new geographies (including the US, Argentina and Australia). It intends to build a stand-alone business that could IPO in the future and has accumulated significant funding to pursue aggressive growth.

Quick Facts