BioPhero A/S raises US$17m in Series A funding

New investor  exFMC Ventures, as well as existing investors Syngenta Group Ventures and Novo Holdings also participated in the funding. The company aims to replace chemical insecticides with sustainable biological insect pheromones. Unlike with insecticides or GM crops, insects do not develop resistance to insect pheromones because they are produced by females to attract males for mating and do not present a single target that can easily be overcome by evolution.

BioSphero said it will use the proceeds to ramp up production of cost-effective products that allow farmers to control major pests in a variety of row crops. According to the company, which was founded in 2016 by Prof. Irina Borodina as a technology spin-out from the Technical University of Denmark and completed its seed round led by Novo Holdings in 2018, the attritutable market exceeds $3bn.

BioPhero A/S was founded on the belief that pheromones can have a very large and positive environmental impact on agriculture and has successfully demonstrated that it can produce pheromones using microbial fermentation at tonne-scale and is now ready to start production and commercialisation of its first product 

“We aim to give farmers a new option: to protect their crops using biological insect pheromones rather than having to rely on insecticides," said Kristian Ebbensgaard, CEO of BioPhero. "In row crops this has not been possible until now because of the high cost of pheromones. At BioPhero, we have shown we can break this cost barrier.