The sale of this business is being represented jointly by KBS and our sister company, Quantuma Advisory.
An innovative crop protection chemistry specialist seeking an acquirer to enable continuation of the journey of discovery, development and commercialisation of new, sustainable products for use in global crop protection
Overview
▪ The Company specialises in disruptive crop protection chemistry to increase the sustainability and efficacy of crop protection products.
▪ The Company has generated an extensive pipeline of new candidates (216 novel analogues based on 80 active ingredients across 31 classes of chemistry), including multiple high-value applications.
▪ The Company is pre-revenue, however, and has an extensive IP Portfolio consisting of 11 patents that have now been submitted
▪ It utilises an innovative process that gives increased efficacy for agrochemical compounds, including herbicides, fungicides and insecticides, resulting in lower dose rates.
▪ The Company targets known compounds with novel chemistry, resulting in a significant reduction in the overall risk profile and reduced development and testing times for candidates.
▪ This approach can also be used to extend patent life, providing protection to existing revenue.
▪ This cost of discovery to market is also substantially reduced from indicative $180 million over 8 years to $15 million over 4 years.
Technology and Patents
▪ The Company seeks to address the decline in innovation in agrochemical discovery and the need for more sustainable products.
▪ It does this by making small molecular changes to known, targeted active ingredients, resulting in a new structure which mimics the original with increased efficacy.
▪ The business synthesises, screens and patents. It has been successful in building a portfolio of improved crop protection active ingredients with support from plant data.
▪ The business has a proven discovery capability for novel active ingredients, having previously sold early-stage assets for a multi-million-dollar sum.
Potential benefits of technology
▪ The company addresses important United Nations Sustainability goals, including:
❖ Reducing crops lost to pests, weeds and diseases by altering and improving binding at the target site, thereby combating resistance leading to lower dosages and thus damage to the environment, thus increasing the yield of crops.
❖ Making farming more productive by lowering the barriers of entry for developing economies by increasing the efficacy of pesticides so less can be used, which in turn reduces costs and improves the economic viability of farming.
❖ Reduced usage of chemicals and effects in the wider environment by providing products with increased efficacy and thus a reduced dosage per crop acre.
❖ With innovation declining over the last 20 years, fewer new product introductions have been made into the market. Project Grow can use data from existing product registrations, which can reduce cost by up to 10-fold and cut time to market.
Compounds
▪ Current compounds in process are distributed over fungicides, herbicides and insecticides.
▪ Patent targets include compounds such as Azoxystrobin, Picoxystrobin, Metyltetraprole, Picarbutrazox, Bixafen, and Acetamiprid, several of which have sales of c.£1.0bn.
▪ The total portfolio includes 16 different compounds with total market sales of over £2.9 billion.
Market
▪ The current agrochemical market is $62 billion+, growing at 2.3% CAGR.
▪ The business has a significant serviceable market opportunity with the compounds the company has developed to date having an addressable market of $13 billion.
▪ Potential customer include blue-chip companies with existing in-house discovery capabilities or companies with experience of fine chemistry, registration and product development
