Switch Bioworks has raised US$17 million in Series Seed financing to bring a new biological fertilizer technology to the field.

Switch Bioworks is a biotechnology company that engineers symbiotic, nitrogen-fixing microbes that live on plant roots to replace conventional fertilizer. The company was spun out of Stanford University in 2022 and is headquartered in San Carlos, California.

“Making nitrogen fertilizer with biology is something that scientists have tried to do for 50 years,” said founder and CEO of Switch Bioworks, Dr. Tim Schnabel. “What’s been limiting the efficacy of biofertilizers is that as soon as microbes are engineered to make fertilizer, it’s so energy intensive that they are no longer able to compete with native microbes in soil and on plant roots. That’s a problem, because if your microbes get outcompeted in a matter of days, they can’t make a meaningful amount of fertilizer over the crop growing season. At Switch, we’re pioneering a ‘switchable’ engineering approach that enables microbes to first compete and establish themselves on plant roots before switching on fertilizer production.”

The first product Switch Bioworks is developing will be a consortium of diverse symbiotic microbes, where each member is engineered to release nitrogen fertilizer under precise genetic control. Applied at planting using existing farmer practices, Switch said its product will cost less than the conventional fertilizer it replaces.

The company adds it has developed a modular platform of switches that can improve the performance of many precision-engineered biological products and is actively building R&D and product development collaborations in the agriculture and biotech industries.

The round was led by Change Forces Capital and joined by Grantham Foundation, Astanor Ventures, Acre Venture Partners, Anthos Capital, Thia Ventures, Emerson Collective, as well as the farmer-led Ag Ventures Alliance and others. With the addition of a pre-Seed round raised in 2022 and grants from organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Switch Bioworks has now secured over $25 million.

This latest financing will be used to complete product development of the company’s first carbon-neutral biological nitrogen fertilizer, including initial scale-up fermentation and formulation as well as greenhouse and field trials in the U.S. and internationally.