Pluton Biosciences, a St. Louis based biotechnology startup has raised $6.6 million in seed funding to advance its product development efforts. According to the startup, the financing was led by Oakland-based venture capital firm Better Ventures. Other investors include the Grantham Foundation, Fall Line Capital, First In Ventures, Wing Venture Capital and St. Louis-based Yield Lab Institute.
“With this new round of capital, we’ll be able to build Pluton’s value as an innovative force, providing solutions to the climate and agriculture challenges of our time. Credit goes to the leadership and science team who generated the results to make this all possible,” said Pluton founder and Chief Scientific Officer Barry Goldman.
Founded in 2017, Pluton Biosciences is a natural product development company dedicated to discovering new microbes that drive environmental sustainability practices worldwide. Pluton’s current product efforts focus on agriculture, using microbes to fight climate change and replacing synthetic chemical applications with eco-friendly microbial products. Pluton uses its Micromining Innovation Engine, a high-throughput microbial discovery platform, to identify and isolate novel organisms within months to dramatically improve R&D throughput for agtech companies. According to the company, the process allows for inexpensive examinations of microorganisms in soil samples to discover new bacteria, fungi and viruses.
Pluton’s newest funding follows a research agreement signed earlier this year with Germany-based Bayer to use its technology to develop soil microbes designed to store carbon and nitrogen. The microbes will be deployed through a spray product that would be used by growers. The startup says its research has found the microbial-based product could capture about 2 tons of carbon from the air per acre of farmland on an annual basis.
Additionally, Pluton has been selected for several prominent accelerator programs, including two based in Silicon Valley. In 2020, Pluton expanded with the acquisition of Microbe Inotech Laboratories, a commercial research and testing lab in Maryland Heights.
