Why we invested:

The world’s biggest meat, produce, and animal health companies take vast sums of money and light it on fire on a recurring basis. They don’t want to do this, but due to consistent shortcoming in pathogen detection no one has managed to avoid the steady recurrence of recall and herd losses. It is shocking that no major life sciences company has delivered a solution to this industry that wants rapid turnaround time, ease of use, and sensitivity. This is despite the prospect of huge customers, high frequency product use, long term stickiness, and willingness to pay: A single food processor who makes $5 million in revenue per day will spend $125 million a year on testing alone. This is not including the revenue losses when they have to shut down the plant to figure out where a pathogen got through their defenses.

We’ve done diligence on a ton of teams and approaches over the years and believe Hypercell checks all the boxes to drive industry-wide adoption. Their CEO (Bruno) is an industry vet, both as the builder of a billion dollar-plus animal health division and an expert in veterinary medicine. When we first met Bruno he had already been on site at several plants to dive deeply into the real problems that plague this industry, and was developing a product that solves all those needs. Their technology provides results in minutes instead of hours or days in real world settings, and is easy enough for anyone to use (even scores of MBAs). Hypercell currently has six-figure partnerships and LOIs from Cargill, JBS, FPL, and others, with even more finalizing now.