Peptide Company Focused on Insecticides, SOLASTA Bio Raises $14m Series A
Peptide Company Focused on Insecticides, SOLASTA Bio Raises $14m Series A
Plus Corteva Catalyst makes first official investment announcement.
SOLASTA Bio Completes $14m Series A to Accelerate Nature-Inspired Crop Protection
SOLASTA Bio, a leading agri-biotech company specialising in the next generation of green insecticides, has completed an oversubscribed $14 million Series A funding round to accelerate the development of its unique peptide-based, nature-inspired bioinsecticides – the first of their kind to be developed worldwide.
The investment round was led by Forbion via its BioEconomy fund strategy, with co-lead investment from agricultural strategics FMC Ventures (FMC Corporation) and Corteva Catalyst (Corteva, Inc.). Participation from existing investors included Cavallo Ventures (Wilbur-Ellis), Rubio Impact Ventures, Scottish Enterprise, UKi2S, SIS Ventures and University of Glasgow, bringing the total raised to date to $19 million. In the context of this round Joy Faucher from Forbion will join the company’s board of directors.
Index:
Investor Overview
What is a Peptide and What does SOLASTA Bio do?
Peptide Organizations Overview
Challenges with Peptides
Revenue Streams and Go-to-Market
Final Thoughts
Peptide company SOLASTA Bio has now raised $19 million. The Company has been developing its technology since licensing IP from the University of Glasgow. According to Verified Market Research, the bioinsecticides market size was valued at $3.52 billion (USD) in 2024 and is projected to reach $10.22 billion by 2031 growing at a CAGR of 15.69% from 2024 to 2031.
Before getting into SOLASTA, there is another notable aspect to this news:
It marks Corteva Catalysts first publicly disclosed investment.
Corteva announced their Catalyst initiative in March, calling it an “investment and partnership platform.”
Corteva stated that they will initially focus on identifying opportunities across four strategic verticals aligned with the company’s R&D priorities:
genome editing
biologicals and natural products
technology platforms
decision science
The effectiveness of R&D spend in agriculture has been declining, yet Corteva is one of the major input organizations to commit to increasing R&D spend, along with establishing Catalyst as another avenue for finding innovation:
Notably, FMC Ventures is also involved in the SOLASTA round. FMC Ventures has also invested in peptide company Micropep, and biosolution company Agrospheres. Cavallo Ventures, Wilbur Ellis’s venture division, is involved as well, which has also invested in peptide company Vestaron along with Agrospheres.
What is a Peptide and What makes Solasta Bio Unique?
Peptides 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:
Peptides have the potential to deliver the efficacy of synthetic chemistry with the environmental footprint of microbials and with less limitation than RNAs (nucleotides), offering improved plant penetrability and supply chain/environmental stability.
SOLASTA Bio specializes in very small protein (micropeptide) insect control capabilities that are based on endogenous insect peptides, which govern insect physiology and behavior.
The company develops peptides based on insect “neuropeptides” to deliver novel bioinsecticide products. Insect neuropeptides are small molecules, responsible for most of the physiological activities of an insect such as signaling processes, pheromone synthesis and muscle activities. That means SOLASTA solutions act on specific targets in insect tissues, altering their behaviour and disrupting lifecycles— such as making them forget to lay eggs, or avoid feeding— rather than killing them directly.
There are two key types of peptides used for crop protection purposes: