Micropep Raises $29M in Series B Funding and Unveils Krisalix, its Proprietary Discovery Platform
An overview of the Micropep business, including patents, pipeline and potential revenue models along with a breakdown of the companies and opportunity for peptides used as crop protection.
Index:
Funding Release Quote and Background
What is a Micropeptide and What does Micropep do?
Peptide Organizations Overview
Challenges with Peptides
Revenue Streams and Go-to-Market
Final Thoughts
Micropep Raises $29M in Series B Funding and Unveils Krisalix, its Proprietary Discovery Platform - Business Wire
Micropep Technologies (Micropep), the global leader in micropeptide technology, today announced a $29 million Series B funding round along with its proprietary discovery platform, Krisalix. The round was led by Zebra Impact Ventures, and BPI Green Tech Investment. All existing investors, Fall Line Capital, FMC Ventures, Sofinnova Partners, Supernova Invest, and IRDI Capital Investissement also participated, bringing the company’s total funding to more than $51.8 million.
Micropep plans to use the Series B funding to accelerate go-to-market strategy through partnerships, complete the regulatory studies of the first biofungicide molecule, and expand its pipeline of micropeptide active ingredients on the Krisalix™ platform.
Micropep was founded in 2016 as a spin-off of Plant Science Research Laboratory in Toulouse (LRSV) and Toulouse University.
After raising this Series B, Micropep has now raises almost $52 million.
What is a Micropeptide and What does Micropep do?
Micropeptides are natural molecules encoded in plant genomes. They are made of about 10 to 30 amino-acids, the natural building blocks of life. There are 20 different natural amino-acids, which give about 10 trillion different combinations possible to make 10 amino-acids long peptides.
What distinguishes Micropep’s peptides from others are their size:
The Micropep platform, Krisalix, leverages computational biology and AI to browse genomes and identify potential micropeptides sequence candidates. The Micropep algorithms help select candidates according to their predefined criteria— the peptides provide control by disrupting specific physiological processes in pests.
Micropeptides have the potential to deliver the efficacy of synthetic chemistry with the environmental footprint of microbials and with less limitation than RNAs, offering better plant penetrability and supply chain/environmental stability.
What makes me excited about peptides is the potential for new modes of action, enabling farmers to better manage resistance, and also the potential lower up-front investment necessary to bring a new mode of action to market (relative to synthetic chemistry).
Micropep is already illustrating potential in the herbicide mode of action realm. In Micropep’s recently granted patent, they talk about some of the weeds targeted:
Finally, it was tested whether cPEPs could decrease the growth of weeds by targeting a Brassicaceae species, Barbarea vulgaris, and it was shown that a mixture of cPEPs targeting corresponding proteins was capable of doing so. To go further, one of the most invasive and problematic weeds, Amaranthus, was selected and cPEPs were designed to target the corresponding proteins…A mixture of these cPEPs was able to decrease plant growth.
Given this, it wouldn’t surprise me to see an Amaranth focused product in the future.
There is potential for peptides as biostimulants as well, as illustrated in numerous journal articles.
Peptide Organizations
Micropep is not the only peptide based company out there.
Biotalys, a pre-commercial (awaiting registration of first product), but publicly traded company out of Europe currently has a market cap of $106 million USD.
Plant Healthcare Plc is a publicly traded peptide company on the UK stock exchange that is primarily a peptide-product driven company. It was recently announced that they had been acquired by PI Industries, an India-based agchem business for ~$41 million USD. According to their 2023 annual report, PHC had consolidated revenue of $11.2 million with a 60% gross margin in 2023, and $11.7 million of revenue with equivalent margins in 2022.
The below image illustrates other peptide companies in the industry along with some of their crop input company partnerships across the industry: