Fellowship Spotlight: Terragenome Ventures
Terragenome Ventures is a seed and series A fund investing in companies that are poised to drastically change the ways we grow food, adapt to climate change, and secure global supply chains. With a $50M target raise, the fund is looking to back international startups working in this vital and rapidly expanding space and ultimately contribute to a much more sustainable future.
CRISPR: A Cutting-Edge and Game-Changing Technology
Terragenome Ventures Founder and Managing Director, Mary Louise Gifford, is focused on promising companies combining cutting-edge CRISPR technology and artificial intelligence to revolutionize agriculture. CRISPR – which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats – is a gene-editing technology that can precisely modify DNA sequences in living cells. With fast-tracked regulation and safer and more precise technology than GMOs, CRISPR is transforming medicine, biology, and agriculture.
“Think of CRISPR like programming software – but for life. Just as you can edit lines of code to change how a computer behaves, you can edit DNA to change how a plant responds to its environment,” Gifford explains. “In agriculture, that means helping crops adapt faster to drought, floods, and disease.”
Based on a naturally occurring system found in bacteria, CRISPR makes it possible to add, remove, or alter genetic material. Most importantly for Terragenome’s work, CRISPR can enhance crop yields to create more food, better nutrition, and expanded opportunities for farmers without increasing the negative impact that industrial agriculture has on the environment.
“CRISPR can help plants adapt more quickly to things like drought, floods or crop disease,” Gifford explains. “Farmers are already feeling the impact – last year alone, extreme weather and wildfires caused over $20 billion in losses across U.S. farms.” Panama disease, for example, which is on every continent, renders soil entirely incapable of growing bananas. Beyond the industry losing massive amounts of money at the hands of Panama disease, the livelihoods of farmers all over the globe are at risk.
While advising UC Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), Gifford helped uncover a potential solution. The IGI team had developed a genome-edited and Panama disease-resistant banana that had lost a majority of its funding and was just sitting in a lab. Gifford leveraged her own network and connected the IGI team with Fyffes, one of the largest banana producers in the world, who was struggling with how to sustain their production in the face of this devastating crop disease. “And it isn’t just bananas,” she underscores. “Crops all over the world are suffering. I’m partnering farmers and producers with groups and industries that have the money and ability to help build out crop resilience.”
Unique Insights into Agricultural Innovation
With two decades of experience tackling climate challenges across the World Bank, the United Nations, and the private sector – along with a track record of investing in transformative technologies and leading two startups to successful exits – Gifford offers a rare, cross-sector perspective on scalable solutions for planetary impact. Most recently, with the startup FBSciences, she pioneered a carbon market strategy and led a task force to get other industry leaders onboard that led to the company’s acquisition by Sumitomo.
An environmental engineer by training, Gifford focused her masters studies at UC Berkeley on the confluence of economics, engineering, and business, sharpening her understanding of what it takes to implement new ideas and solutions that work.
Her track record has landed her several sought-after achievements, including being named the head of the climate-smart task force at the Fertilizer Institute, one of the world’s most powerful agricultural lobbying organizations; advising global governments at the UN and World Bank on $90M infrastructure and investment projects around sustainability; and working in India as chief of staff at the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where her team devised a relentless PR strategy and outreach that contributed to the organization winning the Nobel prize in 2007. These highlights are snippets from Gifford’s extensive tenure living and working throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America to develop innovations that have transformed the industry and global conversations about agriculture, climate change, and sustainability.
Leveraging A Formidable Network
The broader team and network that Gifford is working with only fortifies her already formidable capacity and connections. “Our broader team spans the globe,” she says, “from Dubai, where our Technology Director, Omi Iyanu, a Stanford AI/ML expert and former Google and Microsoft team member who led two successful start-up exits, is motivated by enabling food security in his homeland of Nigeria, to the West Coast of the U.S., where Terragenome’s team of PhD genomic scientists help vet the state-of-the-art startups using CRISPR.
Motivated by Lived Experience
“The potential of CRISPR is what gets me up in the morning,” Gifford shares enthusiastically, embodying and emanating her passion for her work. But her orientation toward agriculture was seeded long ago. “I come from farming stock,” she says, explaining that her grandparents and many generations before them were farmers. “Growing up in rural Upstate New York and visiting my grandparents' farms and my best friend’s dairy farm,” she reflects, “I’ve seen firsthand the consequences of flood, drought, and biotic stress on farmers. They can be right at the margin of income they need to survive, and really suffer when there’s a bad drought or a bad pest or whatever else.”
This proximity to the problems that come with farming piqued her interest and commitment to addressing climate-related challenges in a way that many of us might not experience in our modern context. “Often we’re so removed from our food sources that, when we buy our food at the grocery store,” she says, “we don’t think of all of the things that have to happen to get it there.” She says that focusing on rural communities – where farming is a primary source of income for so many – has always been a personal driver as a result of the context she grew up in and seeing the struggles of farmers up close. Combining this concern with her realization of the massive market opportunity it presents led her to launch Terragenome Ventures.
What Sets Terragenome Ventures Apart
“We’re one of a kind,” Gifford says of her firm with clarity and confidence. “There is no other firm right now that’s focused on CRISPR agriculture. It's a very new and upcoming technology.” In addition to the actual technology that Terragenome’s tapping being revolutionary, the firm is also digging into something that hasn’t received enough emphasis: adaptation to climate change.
“What are we doing right now and how are we preparing people – especially lower-income and other marginalized communities – to best navigate the ways they’re being impacted by climate change? How do we equip our culture, society, and communities to better adapt to changes we know are going to happen and are already happening?” She mentions that there’s plenty of emphasis on software and mitigation while adaptation has largely gone ignored and underfunded.
This is one of many reasons why conditions are ripe for Terragenome’s success in this particular moment. Gifford elevates the fact that the science is ready, given the confluence of AI, metagenomics, and CRISPR, just within the last year. “They’ve all come together to make innovation for agriculture much faster and, because it’s much more accurate, the regulations are also reduced.”
She also points to the urgency of the global demand working in Terragenome’s favor, as millions of farmers and large corporations alike are seeking solutions to the climate-related challenges they’re facing. Finally, Gifford elevates, “What’s missing is capital that has the right mix of scientific, regulatory, and market fluency. I have a scientific team with PhDs from Stanford and Berkeley and the world’s leading labs advising me, and I also have an effective business team that’s helping me cultivate powerful partnerships. What sets us apart is our lived experience across science, commercialization, and systems change.”
Terragenome’s Criteria for Successful Investments
Terragenome Ventures is prioritizing investments that demonstrate proprietary technology and strong market demand. Their four criteria for investment include:
Proprietary Technology - The firm is seeking innovative solutions that are unique within the industry.
Market Demand - Terragenome is identifying and investing in trends that drive growth and sustainability in agriculture.
Regulatory Foresight - Terragenome’s team possesses a depth of understanding of the complex regulatory landscape that helps them ensure compliance and market access for companies in their portfolio.
Scalability - The firm is selecting solutions that have the potential for significant growth and broad market adoption.
Tampa-based Soilcea is an example of a company that meets Terragenome’s criteria. In response to the damage resulting from citrus greening and canker in the citrus industry, Soilcea developed a CRISPR-enabled solution that addresses a problem that’s currently costing the citrus industry billions of dollars. Soilcea and other companies working in this space have flipped the standard way that innovation is adopted and integrated. “Instead of having big ag, long timelines, and slow development, CRISPR has created this whole new sector of startups and scientists who can tackle problems on their own.”
Participating in the VC Include Fellowship
“I just feel enormously grateful to have gotten into this cohort,” Gifford shares. “I can’t say enough about my cohort, how incredible everyone is, and the sense of community it’s provided.” Without a conventional background in finance, Gifford felt unsure about so many elements of what it takes to build a VC fund. She says the VCI Fellowship has been a game changer when it comes to this uncertainty. “It’s given me a lot of structure and the ability to map out all the steps I need to take to create a fund.”
She also highlights that it’s been reassuring to be part of a group that mostly doesn’t come from the standard VC path. “I didn’t come from generational wealth, as many people who start funds do – and that’s often how the information gets passed on,” she says. “That makes things easier because you can just focus on your company for three years and not worry about getting paid. VCI is so cool because the cohort, speakers, and alumni are all coming from a background of having to be creative and innovative in the absence of an endowment or other resources. They’ve empowered us by connecting us with people and information to help us succeed.”
Gifford was inspired by our encouragement to learn what you can and leave the door open for others behind you, and emphasizes that she’s committed to doing just that, supporting peers from her cohort and others in the field as her journey continues.
Mary’s passion for technology to support agriculture was apparent from her initial Fellowship application, and her impressive academic and professional background raised the bar for current and future VC Include applicants! We’re honored to play a part in her success and her commitment to helping others succeed as well.
