Agriculture Is Critical Infrastructure. gener8tor Has Been Backing It Across 33 States for 14 years.

The future of American agriculture will be built in layers, on domestic soil, by founders turning advanced science into products the country can make at home and sell to the world. Here is why we treat that work as critical infrastructure, and why backing it has never mattered more than right now.

When people talk about the future of agriculture, the conversation often drifts toward niche verticals or sustainability talking points. We see it differently, and so does the United States. Agriculture is critical infrastructure. It belongs in the same strategic conversation as energy, defense, and advanced manufacturing, and the case for backing it has rarely been stronger or more urgent than it is today.

Not a slogan. A designation.

The United States recognizes sixteen critical infrastructure sectors, defined as the systems so vital to the country that their disruption would have a debilitating effect on national security, the economy, and public health. Food and Agriculture is one of them. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, together with the FDA, serves as the designated risk management agency for the sector.

That framing matters, because it changes the stakes. We are not talking about a single industry among many. We are talking about the supply chains that feed the country, the inputs that flow through American manufacturing, and a category of high-value products the United States can produce domestically and export.

The strategic question is straightforward. Can the country produce more of what it depends on, at competitive cost, on domestic soil, using technology developed and owned here? That is an onshoring problem, an advanced biomanufacturing problem, and a national competitiveness problem. It is also, increasingly, a biology problem.

The future of ag is built in layers

Modern agriculture does not get reinvented in a single leap. It gets upgraded. The most durable innovation starts with a clear understanding of the constraints inside existing systems, the real economics a grower or a manufacturer faces, and then layers new capability on top. Those layers increasingly come from biotechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence, though they are not limited to any one discipline. In practice that can look like a biological seed treatment that cuts the need for synthetic fertilizer, an autonomous sprayer that targets individual weeds instead of dousing a whole field, or a fermentation process that lets a manufacturer produce at home an ingredient it once had to import.

The companies winning in this space are not asking food and ag manufacturers to tear out their infrastructure and start over. They are making that infrastructure more productive, more resilient, and less dependent on volatile and geographically concentrated supply chains. That is the practical shape of the future of ag, and it is exactly the kind of work that turns a critical infrastructure sector into a source of American strength rather than a point of vulnerability.

The gap that opened up, and who closes it

There is a problem standing in the way, and it is not a shortage of good science. It is a shortage of capital where it is needed most.

Over the last several years, venture funding for agtech and food tech pulled back sharply. After peaking near $51 billion in 2021, global agrifoodtech investment fell to $15.6 billion in 2023, a 49 percent year-over-year drop that was steeper than the decline across the broader venture market that year, according to AgFunder. Funding has since stabilized rather than rebounded, holding near $16 billion in both 2024 and 2025, with investors now writing checks far more selectively and favoring companies with real science, sound unit economics, and a clear path to revenue. These companies tend to be capital-intensive and run on longer timelines than software, and the long stretch of cautious fundraising left even strong teams stranded at the hardest moment: the gap between a validated lab result and a product the market can buy. The cost of leaving those breakthroughs stranded is real, and it is measured in continued dependence on foreign suppliers and imported inputs the country does not control.

This is the gap accelerators are built to bridge, and it is the gap gener8tor bridges every day. Our model pairs non-dilutive and early capital with hands-on, concierge support and direct access to a national network of mentors, customers, corporate partners, and downstream investors. We help founders close the commercialization gap: sharpen the commercial case, hit the milestones that de-risk the next round, and get in front of the people who write the checks that scale a company. When the broader market hesitates, that combination is often the difference between a promising technology reaching commercial scale and a promising technology disappearing. Backing critical infrastructure means showing up with capital and conviction in exactly the moments when others step back.

Proof in the portfolio

We do not argue this thesis in the abstract. We back it with companies that are already drawing national attention, several of them out of the BEAM Circular Accelerator we run in California's North San Joaquin Valley, and many of them advancing through a capital environment that has tested the whole sector.

Fermeate, a California company founded by researchers out of Princeton, uses optogenetics, the precise control of cell behavior with light, to make industrial fermentation dramatically more productive. The technology plugs into existing fermentation tanks rather than replacing them, and in early partnerships with global food and ingredient companies it has boosted output by as much as 200 percent with a payback period under a year. Fermeate raised a $2 million seed round led by Newfund Capital. Its premise is the one we keep returning to: every industrial transformation runs on a foundational infrastructure layer, and Fermeate is building that layer for domestic biomanufacturing by upgrading the capacity America already has.

Ruby Bio, based in San Carlos and built on technology licensed from UC Davis, uses naturally occurring, non-GMO yeast to ferment clean-label emulsifiers that replace synthetic additives and palm-derived ingredients. The company recently demonstrated fermentation titers above 100 grams per liter, the single most important metric for proving a process can compete on cost at scale. The result gives American food manufacturers a domestic off-ramp from palm-heavy supply chains and answers a clear shift in what consumers and regulators now demand: fewer artificial inputs, simpler labels, ingredients people recognize.

Krokos Bio, a California company, produces saffron through plant cell culture. Saffron is one of the most valuable agricultural products in the world, and the majority of global supply comes from Iran, which makes the market acutely exposed to geopolitical disruption. Krokos is building a reliable domestic source of a high-value import, and it is doing so with real validation behind it: a $305,000 NSF SBIR Phase I grant, a $75,000 grant from the California Office of the Small Business Advocate, and support through both BEAM Circular and gener8tor. This is supply-chain resilience and import substitution in their most concrete form.

Oleo, led by co-CEOs Gabriella Dweck and Kelly Redmond and recognized on the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 list, converts domestic biomass waste, including almond hulls, soy hulls, and grape pomace, into oil and fuel feedstocks. The company can process more than 30 different waste streams and is building a pre-pilot plant in California. Oleo takes byproducts that American agriculture already generates and turns them into high-value, exportable inputs, all without competing for new farmland.

Four companies, one through line. Each one takes a product the country imports or makes inefficiently and produces it domestically, at higher value, using advanced biology. That is the future of ag as critical infrastructure, and each of these teams is reaching milestones in a market where capital has been anything but easy.

These are early-stage companies, but the same thesis runs through gener8tor's more established AgTech alumni. RevivBio, spun out of Harvard, designs bio-inspired crop and animal health products and is bringing a broad-spectrum biofungicide to market against the fungal pathogens behind hundreds of billions of dollars in annual crop loss. Boston Bioprocess builds the fermentation scale-up capacity that lets domestic biomanufacturers move from the benchtop to industrial production.

What it takes, and why a coalition wins

Jack Marck, a VC investor in AgTech, has written about what it actually takes to build an AgTech hub, and the lesson holds at national scale. Strong hubs need anchor research institutions committed to translational work, real-world testing infrastructure, the trust of the growers and manufacturers who ultimately adopt the technology, consistent convening, and patient capital aligned with how long agricultural innovation actually takes. No single actor builds that. A community builds it, and the strongest communities are coalitions.

That is the case for a national network rather than a single point of activity. American agriculture is regional by nature, and the technologies that strengthen it have to be tested and scaled where the production systems live. Nationwide success in the future of ag will come from connecting the country's strongest regional ecosystems into one coordinated effort, and gener8tor is positioned to help convene exactly that.

We have already built the proof points. The BEAM Circular Accelerator in partnership with gener8tor in California's North San Joaquin Valley advances biomanufacturing and the conversion of agricultural waste into valuable products, alongside anchors including the University of California system, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Almond Board of California. The HudsonAlpha AgTech Accelerator powered by gener8tor in Alabama, now six cohorts deep, pairs HudsonAlpha's depth in agriscience and genomics with gener8tor's national network and Huntsville's strengths as a technology hub.

This sits on top of a platform built for exactly this kind of scale. Across more than 50 communities, gener8tor has run over 450 accelerator programs, backed more than 2,200 startups, and helped those companies raise over $3 billion in total funding. Within agriculture specifically, we have backed nearly 200 AgTech companies across 33 states that have raised more than $260 million in combined funding. Those companies span precision-agriculture robotics and drones, farm-data and AI platforms, fermentation and biomanufacturing, biomaterials, and next-generation ingredients, and more than 60 of them have each raised over $1 million. We know how to stand up a regional node, connect it to mentors, customers, corporate partners, and capital, and run the same playbook in another part of the country.

The work ahead

Agriculture is critical infrastructure. The future of it will be built in layers, on domestic soil, through coalitions, and by founders who can turn advanced science into products America makes at home and sells abroad. The science is ready. The strategic case is clear. What these companies need is conviction and capital at the moment the market has been most hesitant to provide it.

That is the work we built gener8tor to do. Thirty-three states in, we know how to run this playbook, and we know what it costs when no one does. What this moment demands, we have already been doing.

Interested in partnering on AgTech acceleration? Reach out to the gener8tor team.

About the author

Darko Mandich is Ag Practice Chair at gener8tor and Managing Director of the BEAM Circular Accelerator in partnership with gener8tor. He brings 15 years of professional experience at the intersection of agriculture, lab-to-market commercialization, supply chain innovation, startup acceleration, and capital.