Seed funding was led by Ankur Capital to build a platform for the discovery of new sustainable crop varieties.
India/UK-based Agri-Genomics start up, Piatrika Biosystems has raised $1.2 million in a seed round led by Ankur Capital. The company is bringing sustainable seeds and agri chemicals to market faster and cheaper. The investment will be used to build a strong Product Development team, also for more profound research, and to accelerate the productionising and commercialization of MVP.
Piatrika Biosystems is incubated out of NIAB (Cambridge, UK) & ICRISAT (Hyderabad, India) and working with Researchers, Seed companies & Research institutes. Founded in 2019 by Vasudev Kumanduri and Phani Yarlagadda, Piatrika Biosystems is also building a new innovative cloud-based enterprise Platform-As-A-Service (PAAS) for agri-genomic discoveries and plant breeding decision support, program designing, and monitoring. The seed discovery platform is supported by novel technologies in computational biology and data science, integrating this with autonomous phenotypic, temporal, and spatial data capture for more accurate analysis helps enhance the discovery process. The company aims to bridge the gap between scientific research and commercial enterprise solutions.
Vasudev Kumanduri, Co-Founder & CEO, Piatrika Biosystems, said, “There remains a significant disconnect between state-of-the-art research and its practical implementation. This means that while there has been ground-breaking research in recent years in computational biology / genomics, data science, cloud and instrumentation, this important knowledge has not been applied in a timely practical manner in agriculture. There is an urgent need to translate these research advances into practical benefit for the agriculturist, the consumer and ultimately the planet through modern, sustainable and ethical food production.”
Ritu Verma, Partner, Ankur Capital said, “We are excited to partner with Piatrika on their journey to enable and create new seeds through computational biology. With the challenges that agriculture faces both from climate and increased food demand, innovation in the seed sector is critical. With advances in computational biology, we see this as a critical tool to bring new seeds to market quickly.”
