Projini Agchem CEO: $60 Billion Agrochemical Industry ‘Not Likely to Disappear’
The $60 billion crop protection industry, relying on several hundreds of active ingredients, is facing two major challenges. First, many of the active ingredients are deregulated (banned from use), and/or expected to be banned, and/or have been long enough in the market for the pest to develop resistance. And secondly, the classical chemical discovery operations seem to exhaust their potential, and high throughput screening of the currently known chemicals results with too few novel compounds.
So the need is to innovate and discover new active ingredients, which can help the industry sustain its growth. That’s why agritech startups such as Projini Agchem have entered the market, according to CTech. Founded in 2019, the Israel-based company has raised a total of $2.5 million — from investors such as Bayer-Trendlines Fund, Trendlines Group with IIA, Sirius Global, and Migal — to help develop safe ingredients for the crop protection industry. Projini’s novel small molecules are developed with its proprietary AI-driven discovery platform and new mode-of-action.
The company recently joined CTech for its Startup Boarding Pass series to share some of its milestones and plans for the future.
“The $60 billion crop protection agrochemical industry is not likely to disappear,” explained Dotan Peleg, CEO of Projini Agchem. “Important biological developments can help to replace 15% of synthetic chemicals with biological chemicals. Yet the global agri-produce remains at large dependent on the cost-effectiveness of synthetic chemicals. It is therefore necessary to push for innovation and a revolution in chemistry, which would continue to play a key role in pesticides.”
Most of the active pesticides today have been in use for decades, Peleg said, and were discovered randomly by the industry by high-throughput screening. “Their side effects were sometimes only discovered in practice many years later,” he said. “Projini’s technology is based on two principles of operation: safe chemistry and ‘on-demand’ chemistry. The inspiration comes from ‘customized/personalized medicine’ — as Projini co-founders Dr. Maayan Gal and Itai Bloch come from the field of drug discovery using artificial intelligence.
“Computer science also plays a key role here, and with advanced algorithms, can systematically scan tens of millions of substances within days and pinpoint specific molecules that have the potential for targeted and safe action on weeds, fungi, and other pests.”
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