Durham agtech startup Avalo secures $11M in funding
By Kyle Marshall | This article originally appeared via NCBiotech's blog
Avalo, a Durham startup using artificial intelligence to help develop climate-resistant crops, has secured $11 million in a Series A investment round.
Founded in 2020, Avalo has developed an AI-powered platform to create more resilient and sustainable seeds and plants. One example is new sugarcane varieties that consume less water and fertilizer. Avalo says it’s working on a non-tropical sugarcane aimed at reducing deforestation in regions that historically have produced sugar.
Agtech venture capital firm Germin8 Ventures and life sciences firm Alexandria Venture Investments led the round. Among the other participants is the venture arm of Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, which plans to use Avalo’s low-water, low-nitrogen sugarcane to help reduce emissions from sugar production.
“Ingredients represent one of the hardest-to-abate emissions areas in our value chain, and by tackling the problem at its source, Avalo has the potential to create more sustainable crops,” Nicola Tongue, with CCEP Ventures, told trade publication AgFunderNews.
Avalo was co-founded by Mariano Alvarez, who serves as the company’s chief scientific officer, and Brendan Collins, its CEO. While Alvarez was doing postdoctoral work at Duke University, he combined his studies of plant genomes with research in interpretable machine learning led by Cynthia Rudin, a Duke computer scientist and engineering professor.
Alvarez and Collins then teamed up to brainstorm business models that could apply those areas of study to sustainable crop development, according to a 2023 profile in Triangle technology publication GrepBeat. That led the two to start Avalo, which is now headquartered near Research Triangle Park.
The company calls its core technology Gene Discovery by Informationless Perturbation, or GDIP. The process offers a faster way to identify genetic traits in crops, even when some of the necessary data is missing. As a result, new crop varieties with reduced ecological impact can be developed much more quickly, Avalo says.
“I do think AI is going to have a meaningful impact across agriculture, including the large language models, and things like computer vision for precision agriculture,” Collins told AgFunderNews.
“But in genetics, there is not a huge amount of historical data to power those LLMs in a meaningful way, especially in crops beyond maize and soy. And that’s why we think our version of AI and ML is extremely valuable as we can make the most of the sparse and limited data that there is.”
With the new funding, Avalo also plans to develop cotton grown with less water and fertilizer. Additional work underway includes alternative forms of rubber and varieties of rice better suited for regional conditions.
