Agritech

Peptobiotics raises $6.2M for antibiotics alternatives in agriculture

April 12, 2024

Here’s Singapore’s Peptobiotics! They’re creating the best alternative to antibiotics for the farming industry. Now, they’ve just raised a $6.2M Series A!

Investor check. Hatch Blue led the round. SEEDS Capital, Seventure Partners, GrainCorp Ventures, Farmabase, Trendlines Agrifood Fund, Ponderosa Ventures and The Yield Lab Asia Pacific also joined in.

The anti antibiotics club

Antibiotics overreliance is a huge problem, especially in agriculture.

  • Why? Majority of the antibiotics sold are used in agriculture—with some estimates saying it's as high as 70%.
  • They give healthy animals antibiotics to keep them healthy and prevent disease, but it promotes resistance.

More bacteria spreading. When bacteria in animals become resistant to antibiotics, these can transfer to humans through direct contact or through the environment.

  • But less effective drugs. Once the bacteria spreads, we’ll have a tough time treating the bacteria or diseases because they’re now resistant.
  • In 2019, an estimated 1.2M people died globally because of antimicrobial resistance.

🐓 For the farms

Founded in 2020, they’re creating better alternatives to antibiotics, specifically made for raising livestock and aquaculture—without causing antibiotic resistance.

  • They’re designed to be humane for animals, effective for farmers, safe, and clean for nature.
  • They’re also designed to be better for gut health, improve animal welfare and growth, and easily fed.

A little more detail. It’s synthetically created using naturally occurring bacteria-inhibiting protein called recombinant antimicrobial peptides.

  • These can kill bacteria as efficiently as antibiotics without causing resistance.
  • Their process makes their solutions price competitive with conventional antibiotics and scalable.

🚀 Next stop

They’ll be taking their antibiotic alternative for the farming and aquaculture sector to market and producing larger commercial volumes.

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