AgroSpheres

Shiny gold letters hang on AgroSpheres’ lobby wall spelling out the start-up’s vision: a future built by nature’s technologies. At the opposite end of the facility sits a 1,300 m 2 warehouse where the company plans to scale up a fermentation process to produce its first commercial product. The Charlottesville, Virginia–based firm seeks to develop environmentally friendly, biobased alternatives to chemical pesticides. The start-up engineers microbes to produce a small, spherical shell that encapsulates biomolecules such as proteins, metabolites, and RNA. The microbes can be programmed to produce the biomolecules and encapsulate them, or they can produce the shells alone to go around existing biomolecules. Either way, the encapsulated molecules are then precisely delivered to control agricultural pests. The product closest to commercialization is a biofungicide that will address diseases like botrytis and powdery mildew in fruits and vegetables, primarily in California and Oregon, says Ameer Shakeel, AgroSpheres’ cofounder and