The 2023 Seed Innovation Challenge, which culminated at Seed Innovation Days Nov. 16 and 17, 2023 in Korneuburg, Austria, is a global search for the most innovative new seed industry solutions. Hosted by RWA Raiffeisen Ware Austria and the Agro Innovation Lab (RWA’s innovation subsidiary), the Seed Innovation Challenge drew applications from 65 innovators from 24 countries. Nominees’ innovations spanned seed industry priorities from breeding and portfolio management to field production/seed multiplication and from factory production/seed processing to distribution, logistics, quality management and more.
And the winner of Seed Innovation Days 2023 is…
Founded: 2021
Location: Germany
CEO: Antje Wolff
Employees: 3-5
Product: phenoTest and phenoScort
Application field: seed processing and quality management
phenoLytics GmbH was awarded the Seed Innovation Challenge’s top honors. Their winning system – phenoTest– offers fully automated 3D or 4D phenotyping of seeds and seedlings with high throughput and precise measurement of internal and external organs, including hidden structures such as roots in medium, generating actionable big data. The connected 3D seed sorting system – phenoScort leverages this data to sort for usable seeds.
The judges praised phenoLytics’ innovators for their “mature, market ready technology, which represents a game-changer in seed analysis”.
“For us, this victory is a great affirmation of our ideas. phenoLytics stands for disruptive technology, the use of which requires a fundamental rethinking in seed analysis. We are pleased that its potential has been recognized,” said phenoLytics founders Antje and Johannes Wolff. Winning, Johannes says, was a great surprise.
“We came here not primarily to win the Challenge but to find collaborators, to find this kind of validation from industry experts, to find new applications. [Winning] was a huge confirmation for us, really a validation that even leading experts in the field of seed technology also consider our technology to be as valuable as we see it.”
In addition to being able to showcase their own innovation, Antje and Johannes say they appreciated Seed Innovation Days as an opportunity to see the impressive breadth and depth of innovation currently occurring within the seed industry, and possibly to build the relationship for future collaboration.
“The format of the event was really unique, bringing together everything from predicting the climate, to pollen analysis, to field phenotyping and getting all these experts and innovators together to find a lot of common ground, ways to potentially work together and to break down the silos that very often exist in an industry,” says Johannes.
Now that phenoLytics has the Seed Innovation Challenge win in hand, what’s next for the company? It’s full steam ahead, says Antje.
“We are currently developing new algorithms [and] we are currently also developing a new device which will allow to measure at variable resolutions, smaller and larger plants, hopefully at an even higher throughput. Together with adapted algorithms, this will allow us to optimally cover all seeds and seedlings, from fine grasses to large forestry plants.”
The company is also focused on integrating its technological offerings.
“We have pitched mainly one technology here, but we have an interconnected portfolio: we have 3D phenotyping for the lab, we have 3D field phenotyping technology, and we have a patented 3D sorter to leverage this integrated data. Really [the goal is to] integrate these technologies into an ecosystem, leverage that data across the ecosystem, use the 3D data to sort and to correlate it with the output in the field: really integrating not just an isolated niche application, but really something that can disrupt and help to improve all kinds of processes across the whole value chain,” says Johannes.
Seed Innovation Challenge Finalists included:
Amphasys AG
Founded: 2012
Location: Switzerland
CEO: Marcel Ottiger
Employees: 15-50
Product: Ampha P20 and Ampha Z40
Description: Instruments to measure the condition of pollen cells in the field in a fast, easy and accurate way. The technology provides information to improve line selection, phenotyping, crop placement, female-to-male ratio, DH production and access to information that was not available before.
Arable
Founded: 2015
Location: United States
CEO: James Ethington
Employees: 100+
Product: Mark3
Description: Arable provides sensors for the characterization of trial fields. The Mark3 third generation sensor, recently launched in Europe, was designed for research with a complete data portfolio (climate, soil, plant health with our spectrometer, pictures from the trial fields and irrigation monitoring) all fully integrated into the application. Mark3 acts as a hub for wired and wireless sensors in the field, connecting third-party sensors through SDI-12, pulse, analog, RS232 or Bluetooth.
ClimateAi
Founded: 2017
Location: United States
CEO: Himanshu Gupta
Employees: 51-100
Product: ClimateLens
Description: The ClimateLens platform provides short to long-term (1 day to 40 year) insights into weather and climate impact at a crop and region-specific level. Helps seed companies assess key risks (heat stress, frost, pest/disease) for crop suitability to optimize breeding, R&D, sales & marketing and production efforts.
Cropin Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
Founded: 2010
Location: India
CEO: Krishna Kumar
Employees: 100+
Product: Cropin Cloud
Description: Cropin Cloud’s key feature is global management of R&D efforts by crop and variety, reducing costs and time through a single source of truth. It also allows centralized seed production management with localization options based on preferred farming practices, ensuring efficient farming.
Cropt
Founded: 2019
Location: Serbia
CEO: Oskar Marko
Employees: 6-14
Product: Al models for optimal distribution/recommendation of seed varieties.
Description: Al models are trained using satellite, soil, weather and field data to predict behavior of crops/varieties in different locations. Based on the predictions, the technology recommends the appropriate variety (or a portfolio of varieties). Winner of Syngenta Crop Challenge and GIAR Inspire Challenge.
Green and Seed
Founded: 2019
Location: South Korea
CEO: Sung-jin Choe
Employees: 6-14
Product: Seed Film Cultivation (SFC)
Description: Seed Film Cultivation is a seed sowing technology that attaches seeds to a biodegradable film, then spreads the film on farmland and covers it with soil to make seed-soil contact, enabling high yields with less water, fertilizer, and labor. The technology consists of a ‘seed-attacher’ and a mulcher.
hiphen
Founded: 2014
Location: France
CEO: Alexis Comar
Employees: 15 – 50
Product: PhenoMobile
Description: Industrial-grade imaging solutions, data fusion and artificial intelligence combine to give access to ultraprecise plant measurements remotely, helping researchers assess crops in a high-throughput fashion. PhenoMobile utilizes industrial sensors, high-tech engineering and smart processing to capture and process plant phenotyping data that can then be used to develop new seed varieties and input products.
Hudson River Biotechnology
Founded: 2015
Location: Netherlands
CEO: Ferdinand Los
Employees: 15-50
Product: Plentrance
Description: Plentrance’s nanoparticle delivery system efficiently takes safe and effective input alternatives into plant cells, minimizing inputs and meeting consumer and environmental demands. Demonstrable active delivery in plants (several species, tissues, and cargoes). Non-toxic and biodegradable, compatible with hydrophobic and water-soluble cargo, inexpensive feedstock, easily scalable for field applications.
Proofminder
Founded: 2021
Location: Hungary
CEO: Ambrus Vancso
Employees: 6 – 14
Product: Proofminder Al Platform
Description: The Proofminder platform extracts insights from high-resolution (<0.5 cm/pixel), drone images by Al to provide growers with valuable information and actionable reports about every inch2 of field across the season. Proofminder has a ready-to-use Al model for missed tassel detection in hybrid corn already commercialized and deployed as well as plant distancing and gap detection for sugar beet, yield estimation, weed detection (Johnsongrass, creeping thistle in corn) and hyper-precise weed map creation for spot spraying.
VitalFluid
Founded: 2014
Location: Netherlands
CEO: Erik Hertel
Employees: 15 – 50
Product: Plasma Activated Water
Description: By copying the natural process of lightning, VitalFluid has created disinfecting properties to clean pathogens from seeds with no chemicals. This seed treatment technology supports healthy seeds and good germination.
Zayndu Ltd.
Founded: 2019
Location: United Kingdom
CEO: Ralph Weir
Employees: 6 – 14
Product: Cold Plasma Seed Treatment
Description: Zayndu has created a system for treating seeds without the use of chemicals using Activated Air, which is a blend of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (RONS). This dry process delivers a boost to seed vigor and cleans pathogens, allowing uniformity and boosting consistency and germination over a wide range of crops.
