- IMIO raised $12 million, with Sofinnova as lead, to build a laboratory and biomanufacturing facility in Chicago.
- The company states that its freeze-dried microbes increased corn yields by an average of 11.9 bushels per acre.
- The funding round was complete, even though most investment trends are currently in favour of AI.
Charles Smith started by concentrating on food waste and eventually established IMIO, the company that currently supplies freeze-dried microbe powder to corn farmers.
The US startup just raised $12 million to build a headquarters, a laboratory, and a biomanufacturing plant in Chicago, with Sofinnova Partners leading the funding round and Chipotle’s venture fund, Cultivate Next, also participating. Other investors include Starshot Capital, Grow Together Salinas, Earth Foundry, and Serra Ventures.
Smith told Tech Funding News that the company is generating revenue and currently employs 10 people, among them some part-time executives.
Biological crop products face reliability issues
Biologicals are products grown from living organisms such as bacteria and fungi. The market will reach $34.99 billion by 2030, growing at an annual rate of 13.7%.
In the interview, Smith pointed out two major problems: delivery methods and the field. According to IMIO, many biological products have been “unreliable and hard to use together with existing farm practices”. The same survey also showed that 98% of respondents said growers use biologicals as a supplement to conventional products, while only 2% use them as complete replacements.
Regarding rivals, Pivot Bio, based in Berkeley, California, sells nitrogen-producing microbes for use at planting. The Belgian startup Aphea.Bio, which raised €70 million in July 2023, develops biostimulants and biocontrol products from microorganisms. While these companies focus on crop growth, IMIO works with post-harvest residue.
The current state of farm economics highlights the value of IMIO. The US Department of Agriculture predicts that net farm income will amount to $158.4 billion in 2026, representing a 2.6% decrease from 2025 figures and 5.5% lower when adjusted for inflation.
From hemp stalks to Midwest corn, and what the trials show
Smith began his career in finance and then spent time at several venture-backed software startups. He got the idea for IMIO while researching environmental issues.
“Around one-third of the food produced worldwide is wasted each year. I regarded that as a serious problem. It’s not just that nutritious value is being wasted, but the fact that it also produces a large amount of methane and strong greenhouse gases,” he said.
Smith established IMIO in 2019, and the company received funding from the National Science Foundation in 2020. According to him, Re-Gen was the first product developed from that grant.
Because the grant focused on hemp, a crop expected to become one of the major crops in the United States, the initial versions of the product were designed to break down hemp stalks. The company later changed its sales strategy, and corn and vegetable crops are now much larger markets than hemp.
The company handles each microbial strain individually, tests them, combines them in specific proportions, and then freeze-dries the mixture so it remains stable when stored, transported, and used.
To keep the microbes alive, Smith employed established freeze-drying techniques. Farmers mix the powder with water and apply it to crop residue, which can retain pathogens. The fungi, bacteria, and yeast in Re-Gen accelerate decomposition and return nutrients to the soil. IMIO provides Re-Gen for both row crops and for produce.
Why investors chose IMIO even as AI attracts most funding
Smith acknowledged that raising money was difficult. At least 113 agrifood and climate technology companies either collapsed or faced major difficulties between 2023 and early 2026, resulting in $18.5 billion in lost private funding. Smaller funding rounds focused on farming include Alvie’s €2.1 million seed round, aimed at reducing pesticide use, and Klim’s $22 million Series A round in 2024.
“Crop residue is a major challenge for farmers, affecting soil productivity and driving up input costs. IMIO combines biotechnology and scalable biomanufacturing to harness microorganisms that restore soil health, recycle nutrients and improve farm economics. This is exactly the kind of real-world application of biology we want to support,” said Guillaume Baxter, partner at Sofinnova.
“Building a better food system starts with making innovation work for growers — improving their economics, strengthening their operations, and delivering value all the way to the people they feed. Through Cultivate Next, we bring growers and food buyers together to help promising technologies succeed in the field and scale across the food system,” added Christian Gammill, co-general partner at Cultivate Next.
The key issue is whether IMIO can demonstrate its reliability through consistent results rather than merely making marketing claims. The difficulty will be maintaining these results for farmers working on their own and ensuring the Chicago plant produces consistently active batches.
