Solasta Bio, a Scottish startup replacing insecticides with greener alternatives, raised $14 million with this pitch deck
Shireen Davies, CEO and cofounder at Solasta Bio.
Solasta Bio, an agriculture tech startup based in Glasgow, has raised $14 million in Series A funding.
Founded by former professors, Solasta specializes in green insecticides for managing crop damage. The startup synthesizes peptides — short chains of amino acids that make up proteins — to create specialized insect control agents.
Based on years of research, Solasta wants to tackle the four main insect groups that harm crops globally, especially fruit and vegetables. It also wants to address other areas of insect concern, such as damage to stored grain and diseases.
“Solasta was founded based on fundamental research carried out by our team to understand how insects survive and how we could push select insects out without insecticides,” Shireen Davies, CEO at Solasta Bio, told B-17. “We developed our platform with our tech, which can use selectively targeted peptides, and we’ve moved fast from the lab to the field, building out our team and technology over the past three years.”
Current solutions are becoming less effective as insecticide resistance grows, meaning new technologies are gaining interest in the market, Davies added. Solasta plans to use the funding to drive R&D activity as it looks to compete on price with other solutions in the market.
Dutch fund Forbion led the $14 million Series A round alongside FMC Ventures and Corteva Catalyst. Existing investors, including Cavallo Ventures, Rubio Impact Ventures, Scottish Enterprise, UKi2S, SIS Ventures, and the University of Glasgow, also participated. This brings Solasta’s total raised to date to $19 million.
“The market wasn’t great for fundraising last year, and this year was the same, but we decided to go out and do this,” Davies said. “In the end, we had a lot of investor interest, and the round was oversubscribed.”
Funds will go toward expanding the company’s US presence, improving its product development and manufacture, and overcoming various regulatory hurdles.
Check out Solasta’s 11-slide pitch deck below:
