Unified exposure management platform (Fund I / Opty | Co-investors: Highland, NGP, Ballistic, Sierra, Cervin)

During my first semester at HBS, I met my two co-founders through Nucleate, a program that matches PhDs and MBAs to start companies. Joseph is a molecular biologist who discovered and patented gene expression biomarkers with the potential to dramatically increase crop yields. Amitesh is an AI scientist who built models for biomarker discovery in human health. We did our earliest customer discovery on my brother's farm in New York and my wife's fourth-generation family farm in Mississippi, and the farmers in the area were so excited by our vision that they invested in our seed round. Ultimately, it was our unique insight around bio-discovery, AI, and agriculture that drove us to start the company.

The world's largest industry is also the most vulnerable. Our food and agriculture system faces existential biological threats, whether natural or man-made. Disease alone destroys over 40% of global food production every year, and drought and nutrient stress compound the damage further. At Crop Diagnostix, we've generated the largest multimodal, real-world dataset on the earliest signal of agricultural health: RNA-level gene expression. Our dataset unlocks bio-intelligence across the entire industry: from preventing yield loss for farmers, to biosurveillance for national security, to yield prediction for crop insurance, to trait discovery for breeding, and input development for manufacturing. Farmers using Crop Diagnostix have seen 8% yield gains and a 23% reduction in inputs, and we've partnered with the largest global agricultural companies to accelerate their R&D and create the next generation of agricultural inputs.

Early on, Tau saw our vision of building the "Tempus of Agriculture": bringing a healthcare business model to a legacy industry. Tau's insight and network across healthcare, enterprise, and AI have opened doors and pushed us to think differently. Beyond anything else, working with the team has been incredibly fun, and we could not be more grateful for their continued support (especially Insoo, who probably hears from me more than he would like)!