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Thank you, Sophie Purdom and Kim Zou for this great article about Activate, Activate fellowship and the startups including Pheronym.

Ilan Gur, founder, and CEO of Activate, puts it best: “technical ideas aren’t the limiting factor to impacting global change. The binding constraint is the lack of opportunity for an enormous pool of talented scientists to go all-in on commercializing their ideas.”

Activate’s climate cohorts

With more than 100 Activate Fellows over 7 years, Activate supports scientists working across sectors, from energy to ag to defense, to commercialize hard-tech innovations, many of which are climate tech solutions. Over the next five years, Activate plans to expand to 100 new fellows per year, most of whom will focus on climate change.

🌱 Food & Ag: Circe Bioscience (CO2 to fats), Nitricity (renewable nitrogen fertilizer production), Perlumi (better seeds), Pheronym (non-toxic pest management), Takachar (transforming waste biomass), Trophic (seaweed-based protein), ZestBio (food waste into products).

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Panel: Women Innovators Working to Solve Farming Challenges

Dr. Kaplan is part of a new generation of startups led by women, with a diversity of backgrounds and ethnicities, seeking to provide novel perspectives and solutions to agriculture’s problems with tech innovation.

Join us on October 14, 2021, at 7:00 am PST for a moderated discussion and audience Q+A!

Register here

If you missed the Women in Ag panel, you have a second chance to listen: https://youtu.be/FrQ9In1Pp_s

Honored to be among these amazing women farmers and founders in Women in Ag panel.

📣 Plug and Play Tech Center is all about building a strong supportive network for #womeninag.

Join us this upcoming Thursday 📆 Sept 23, 2021, 🕔 11 AM – 12 PM (CST), 👉 Register: https://lnkd.in/ePvaeumN

From fully autonomous berry harvesters to plant-based lupini bean protein bars, the startups competing for $3 million in prize money at this year’s Grow-NY Food and Agriculture Competition are bringing revolutionary innovations to the market.

Ten of this year’s finalists have connections to the Cornell community, including: Pheronym (Davis, California): Advised by Pam Marrone ‘78, former staff and Board of Trustees member, Pheronym is using pheromones to control the behavior and development of microscopic roundworms called nematodes, offering a nontoxic path for farmers as they transition away from conventional pesticides.

A Summit Showcase with services for startups and awards ceremony will be held Nov. 16-17 at the Syracuse Oncenter, and available to stream virtually. Keep Reading

 

We are excited to share that Pheronym has been selected as a finalist in the unprecedented food and agriculture competition, Grow-NY! The competition received more than 330 applications from 32 countries, and we are beyond thrilled to be in the top 20. Our journey now begins with preparing our final pitch that we’ll present at the virtual Summit on November 16-17, 2021.

Click here to learn more.

Our CEO, Dr. Kaplan, is honored to be among the amazing panelist at the USPA ACC Western Region Webinar

Join us on September 9th, 2021, at 1:00pm PST

Register here

 

Dr. Marrone’s accomplishments have had an extraordinarily positive impact on the agriculture and food industry. Dr. Marrone started three successful, high-impact agricultural natural product companies (Novo Nordisk Entotech, Inc., AgraQuest, Inc., Marrone Bio Innovations, Inc.,) to bring sustainable, eco-friendly pest control to farmers. At AgraQuest,  Keep Reading

Marrone brings decades of agtech scale up experience for Pheronym’s next phase

DAVIS, California – August 24, 2021– Pheronym, a bioag/agtech pest management company, has announced it has added bioag industry leader Dr. Pamela Marrone to its board of directors.  Marrone will be Pheronym’s first external board appointment.  The appointment follows the closing of the Company’s seed funding round in May led by the Sacramento Angels that also included Marrone.

For more than 30 years, Dr. Marrone has been at the forefront of the agtech industry, successfully founding and scaling two bioag companies, Marrone Bio Innovations Inc. (NASDAQ: MBII) and AgraQuest Inc.  She is currently a senior fellow for the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Arizona State University and serves on the Boards of the Foundation for Food and Ag Research, Marrone Bio Innovations and 180 Lifesciences (NASDAQ: ATNF).  She has a B.S. in entomology with Honors and Distinction from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in entomology from North Carolina State University.

“Dr. Marrone’s decades of insights into growing young companies will be a welcome addition to Pheronym’s efforts to scale and commercialize our breakthrough technology,” said Dr. Fatma Kaplan, CEO of Pheronym.

“I’ve supported Pheronym from the very beginning, first as an advisor, then as an investor, so you can say I’ve always been impressed with the potential of their technology to manage difficult pests,” said Dr. Marrone. “Their science and leadership are exemplary, and I look forward to now helping them move to full commercialization in my new role on their board.” Keep reading

At the Activate fellowship program, last week’s topic was the product-market fit and value proposition: How do we convince the VP to pay for our product? Among many amazing entrepreneurship programs at accelerators and business mentorship programs, none of them presented the value proposition the way the Activate fellowship program panel did. The panel’s take on presenting the value proposition was very different!  Keep reading

Dr. Kaplan is honored to be selected to receive the 2021 Applied Chemical Ecology Award from the International Society of Chemical Ecology.

This award recognizes a significant contribution in developing novel semiochemical-based technologies for advancing practical applications in chemical ecology. “Nematode pheromones for eco-friendly, sustainable agricultural pest control in the soil”

As part of the award, I will deliver a lecture at the 2022 Annual ISCE meeting (Putrajaya, Malaysia).  Please join me at the 2022 ISCE meeting in Malaysia.

We thank the Applied Chemical Ecology Award sponsors (APEX BAIT Technologies, Inc. and Pherobio Technology Co. Ltd).