Start-Up Success: Micropep

World Agri-Tech provides founders a unique opportunity to showcase their ground-breaking innovations and success stories, driving transformative solutions to pressing challenges.

October 17, 2024

Micropep have been involved in the summit almost since the inception – from attending the summit every year, to featuring as a start-up in 2019, to now becoming a partner in 2025.

The company has made headlines this year, closing $29M Series B and unveiling its discovery platform back in July, which increased to $40M with an additional $11 million investment from Corteva, bringing the total funding for the round to $40 million, elevating Micropep’s total funding to over $60 million.

We caught up with Thomas Laurent, Founder & CEO, to discuss recent key milestones, commercialization, and navigating the challenging economic landscape.

What agricultural problems do you address? What is your value proposition? Be specific.

We develop new active ingredients for crop protection based on bioactive micropeptides: short natural linear peptides which target and regulate plant genes or proteins.

Micropeptides combine the efficacy of chemicals with the safety of biologicals and offer cost-competitive and sustainable alternatives to conventional pesticides.

 

What are your company’s recent key milestones?

Since World Agri-Tech San Francisco, we closed a $40M Series B round with 5 new investors and successfully completed the first studies required for the regulatory dossier submission of our first biofungicide molecule.

 

What is driving your commercialization strategy? What have been the pivotal “aha” moments that shaped this strategy?

Our vision is to establish Micropep as a provider of new active ingredients to the industry, collaborating with different companies to launch several formulated products based on each active ingredient, which we believe is the only way to scale successfully without investing hundreds of millions in production and internal sales force.

We indeed realized that crop protection is a very, very fragmented market with a lot of competition; each crop and each geographical market has its particularities. You don’t sell products the same way to potato growers in Idaho than to soybean farmers in Brazil or to wine growers in France.

Behind the big numbers of the crop protection market, the achievable market shares one can get by targeting niche markets remain quite low, as farmers often have the choice between more than 50 different products for any given problem.

So, while it is often possible to reach $5M in sale by going solo on a niche market, it is extremely difficult – if not impossible – to grow to $50M-$100M in sales with a single product marketed alone.

We believe an answer could be in focusing on the active ingredient side and partnering with several companies to develop multiple formulated products with them. This is a strategy we think we can pursue because we believe our cost position could be competitive enough to accommodate another partner between the distribution and us.

What actions are you taking to survive the VC downturn?

As a biotech, VC-backed start-up, you should always keep your eye on your cash position and your cash burn: Cash is King. You first need to have several fall-back plans in terms of cash management in case things don’t go as planned.

In our case, we first worked on several scenarios with our leadership team, including extreme ones, to extend our runway. Knowing that you have a few options under your belt to extend your runway by 3, 6 or 9 months can be very helpful and reassuring.

Second, you should approach different financing models in parallel, whether it’s from paid partnerships, non-dilutive funding like grant or debt, or venture capital. Anything that can extend your runway while keeping you on track for your project is worth investigating.

Finally, when it comes to venture capital money, companies should consider starting raising capital minimum 6 to 9 months before their cash end date. Raising capital is always challenging, but it can be extremely hard and take much much longer in downturn climate.

 

What is your strategy for weathering the current economic climate and turning growth into profitability?

In this type of environment, start-ups should really focus on cash management before anything else.

If they can’t raise money but have paying customers, then it becomes even more critical for them to turn revenue into profit and profit into cash in bank much faster. For example, it could be strategically more interesting to temporarily focus efforts on fast paying customers than on others.

Strategies will vary depending on the business model of each company and its stage of growth.

On our side, as we are still pre-commercial, we mostly focused on cash burn and tried to maximize the output we could get while limiting our expenses. That forced us to be even more focused on what mattered most and stop non-priority projects or initiatives.

What advice would you offer start-ups who are fundraising in today’s challenging economic climate?

A general advice for all start-ups is to start connecting with investors in your space before you really need it. “If you approach investors asking for money, you will come back with advice. But if you approach investors asking for advice, you might come back with money.”

In my opinion, the sooner you can pitch your project, the better.

Chances are that the investors you are going to talk to would already have seen 5 to 10 projects similar or comparable to yours: by asking the right questions and asking for advice, you could learn a lot about where you should focus your efforts to be able to stand out from the crowd.

Then be humble enough to listen and to act on it.

That way, 3 to 6 months later when you will meet again with these investors you could show them all the progress you’ve made, demonstrating your ability to listen to feedback and integrate them in your strategy.

They might not have been in a position to invest 6 months earlier, but they would likely be more intrigued and interested after you demonstrated that you cared about their initial advice.

 

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