Sometimes responding to a long -standing problem is a question of finding a new perspective.
Take cows methane: for years, people have been trying to eliminate the gas from cow rotations to try to limit the impact of cattle on the climate. But they did not make a bump. This is partly because they examined the problem from the point of view of a climatologist, not a farmer.
Kathryn Polkoff, co-founder and CEO of Sabot fingerprint biomeHowever, thought about the problem more like a farmer.
“The first time I have heard of this methane problem, Animal Science 101,” said Polkoff, who has a doctorate in animal sciences in Techcrunch. It was not in the context of climate change, but of the health and productivity of animals.
Polkoff and its co-founder Scott Collins came across a new way of modifying the microbiome of a cow using enzymes, reducing methane while increasing the nutrients available for the cow.
This discovery allowed Hofprint a series of $ 15 million led by SOSV, the startup exclusively said in Techcrunch. Other participating investors include Agrizeronz, Alexandria Venture Investments, Amazon’s Climate Gled Fund, Breakthrough Energy Fellows, Good Growth Capital, Ponderosa Ventures and Twynam. The new round will help the company test its enzymes on the farms.
“We have spent thousands of years raising animals to make them as effective as possible and to increase yield, and but there were not many attempts to change microbiome,” she said. “It would be as if you were genius a car but you had never changed the engine – that’s where all the energy comes from.”
Hoofprint’s power supply additive changes the microbiome in the rumin of a cow and removes the growth of microbes that generate methane, a powerful greenhouse gases that warms the planet 84 times more than the same amount of carbon dioxide.
Rumen is a “mounting chain in Hodgepodge”, said Po Bronson, General Partner Sosv who led the company’s investment in Hoofprint. Things eat cows tend to be very difficult to digest and extract nutrients. During the millennia, cows have evolved alongside a complex microbiome in the Rumen which helps to decompose fodder, releasing nutrients in the process.
The cow absorbs some of these nutrients, but not all. Another group of microbes steals some of these nutrients to generate their own growth to the detriment of cows, generating methane as by-product. “It is a very specific subset of microbes that make methane,” said Polkoff.
The Hofprint enzyme removes these microbes. The startup will use yeast to make enzymes, similar to the way other industrial enzymes are made, including those used in cheese, detergent and other products.
For Bronson in Sosv, the fact that the Hoofprint enzymes derive from the Rumen himself was the key. A previous methane reduction product, Bovaer, was faced with a disinformation wave When a large food company announced testing in the United Kingdom in December.
He doesn’t think Hoofprint will face the same backlash. “The basic concept is that their product is a natural protein. They degrade like any other protein than an animal would eat. They are somehow natural for Rumen.”
Hofprint targets an improvement of 5% of “food efficiency”, said Polkoff, or how many additional books a cow can put for a given quantity of food.
By improving the effectiveness of the rumen of a cow, Bronson is convinced that the hoof fingerprint can succeed with farmers where other startups have failed. “Bringing down methane is table issues,” he said. “To make it a more productive thing is what they will pay.”
