Conversations about the bioeconomy in San Francisco or Boston tend to focus on invention.

The next clever microbe, the next breakthrough protein.

Eshan Samaranayake came to food and agriculture by an unlikely route. He trained as a molecular biologist in Hong Kong and was drawn to the commercial side of biotech. After cutting his teeth at a food-biotech startup, he began writing a newsletter that helped him enter the venture capital industry. Today, he invests across Asia-Pacific in upstream technologies, including ingredients, fermentation, and ag inputs.

From Asia, the bioeconomy looks like a problem of scale, economics, and coordination. Over the course of our SFTW convo, we discussed what outsiders misread, why venture capital is an awkward fit for parts of food and ag, why TAM can be a trap, and why cultivated meat’s timelines slipped by decades.

We discussed Eshan’s path to VC, what working in a lab teaches you about scaling biology, and the economics of feedstock. Eshan finally reframed the discussion, noting that the binding constraint today is no longer science but the ecosystem around it.

The actual conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

An outsider’s path in, and the venture-capital question

Rhishi Pethe: Give us a little bit of your background. How did you get to the point and the role that you’re in right now?

Eshan Samaranayake: I’m Sri Lankan, born and raised in Sri Lanka. I moved to Hong Kong and studied molecular biology and biotechnology. I’ve always been fascinated with biotech. Since I was 12, I knew I wanted to do it. When I first heard that scientists could create glow-in-the-dark carrots by inserting a firefly gene into carrots, I was fascinated.

I thought I would get into academia and do a PhD in gene editing. I still love biotech, but I didn’t want to go into academia, mainly because, for me, the value of biotech lies in commercialization. Academia is the backbone of biotech. You need the research before you commercialize. I want to help get that research to the end user. That’s why I decided to stay in biotech, but on the commercial side.

I graduated from my bachelor’s program in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic. At that time, there was a lot of talk about food insecurity, and that’s really when I started reading about the food system. There’s so much waste and inefficiency in the food system. Chicken is probably a bit of a graphic example, but with chicken, you feed in 9 calories and get 1 out.1 That’s pretty wasteful. So I saw an opportunity for biotech to improve the food system.

My first full-time job was for a food biotech startup in Hong Kong. I was very keen on joining a startup because I wanted firsthand experience of what it takes to build something in this field. I was at the startup for almost three years. I was wearing multiple hats. Even though my title was product manager, I was doing product development, R&D, fundraising, marketing, and business development.

I was so interested in learning everything I could about the food and ag tech space that I was consuming all this content, great articles from folks like Green Queen and AgFunder, and listening to all these podcasts. Because I’m based in Hong Kong, which isn’t an ag-innovation hub, I had limited opportunities to discuss this with peers. But I knew there were people around the world who were really passionate about this, and I wanted to reach them.

I’m already consuming this content. I’ll share my learnings in a newsletter, upload it, and let the internet help me find my people. The newsletter did two things. It was an accountability tool for me to learn about the sector, but also a touchpoint and a way to reach out to people in the agrifood and ag tech space globally. I was able to get in touch with more founders and investors globally. It opened my mind to the fact that startups are the best tools we have to address the major challenges in the food system.

How can I help multiple startups? That led me to the VC side, and I joined Better Bite Ventures two years ago.

A bit about Better Bite: we invest in early-stage food and ag startups based in APAC. We typically invest in upstream technologies. We don’t do much CPG or consumer-facing work. We’ve made over 30 investments across eight countries in the region2, so we’re pretty active in the sector.

Rhishi Pethe: That’s a really interesting journey. Here in the US, there’s a prevailing narrative that the VC model isn’t the right way to fund ag startups. Is it true, and if it’s true, under what conditions is it true?

Eshan Samaranayake: There is definitely some truth to that statement, and it is good that more people are saying it openly, including some of the most experienced GPs in the space. Honesty is good for the ecosystem.

I think it comes down to managing expectations with LPs. If you pitch it to LPs as a high-velocity technology sector and then deliver the returns of a patient capital strategy, you have a structural mismatch between what you promised and what the sector can deliver. So LP selection and expectation management from the start matter a lot. Food and ag can generate real returns, and it can attract capital that cares about more than pure financial return, impact-aligned LPs, development finance institutions, and corporate strategics with long horizons. Those are often better matched to what the sector actually needs.

So, it’s not that VC should not exist in food and ag, but that the VC model imported from software, large funds, short timelines, and high velocity, is structurally mismatched to agricultural transformation timelines. The sector needs a mix. So things like early-stage risk capital that is honest about its role and return profile, patient growth capital that can hold through long commercialization cycles, and development finance that absorbs systemic risk private capital rationally avoids. None of those is sufficient alone.

On whether VC is the right model at all, the answer depends on the stage. At the pre-seed and seed stages, VC is often the only viable source of funding for startups. No bank funds a high-risk startup with no revenue and no hard assets. Grants come with criteria so specific that they fit a narrow slice of what founders actually need. Private equity comes in far too late. So if early-stage VC does not exist in this sector, a large number of technologies never reach the stage that would allow them to raise a larger round from a more patient capital source. That enabling function is real, and I feel it is under-discussed in the critique of VC in agrifood.

The whole sector generally needs more exits. It’s about managing expectations while determining which technologies align with the 10-year horizon.

Going upstream, and the hard reality of scaling biology

Rhishi Pethe: You mentioned you typically invest in upstream technologies. What are some of the sectors or types of technologies you’ve invested in?

Eshan Samaranayake: On the food side, ingredient manufacturing, whether it’s proteins, lipids, coffee, or palm oil. Typically, they’re selling to other businesses, not to consumers. On the ag side, it would be about ag inputs: fertilizers, biostimulants, and seed treatment. We have a portfolio company called Rainstick that’s treating seeds with electricity to improve germination rates. And then the platform plays. Another portfolio company, Algenie, is developing novel photobioreactors for microalgae cultivation.

We realized that, especially in APAC, investors tend to be more risk-averse. The minute they see a technology that’s very deep tech or very science-heavy, they tend not to get involved. But we like those very science-based technologies, because that’s how you get the kind of breakthroughs you need to address some of the major challenges the sector is facing. You don’t want technologies that are making something incrementally better. That’s just not going to cut it for the type of returns you want a VC to have. So we’re looking for technologies that are very science-driven and aim to do something new rather than something incremental.

If you do something consumer-facing, your multiples are typically capped at, let’s say, 2-6x revenue for a CPG deal. But if it’s something very tech-driven, you have the premium for the technology. And these tend to be platform plays that could eld expand into other verticals beyond food, like chemicals and materials. So that also makes more sense from a venture standpoint, to command those premiums that you’re looking for, that optionality.

Rhishi Pethe: You started your career at a startup focused on microalgae production, and then moved to VC. What did you learn that you think you’re able to apply now in your current role as you think about these different investments?

Eshan Samaranayake: The first part is probably kind of boring, because it’s a soft skill. It’s just having more empathy for founders. I feel like more VCs should have experience working at a startup before they write a check or even analyze these startups, especially early-stage ones, where it’s all about the team. There’s so much risk, so many things that could go wrong, and that affects people’s personal lives. You tend to have a lot more empathy for founders who are taking these big risks to tackle these major challenges.

On the tech side, what’s kind of undercovered in most VC due diligence for these early-stage deals is the focus on upstream economics. You talk about yield and titer, but depending on the product, 50% of the ingredient cost can be just downstream processing. So, dewatering, drying it if it’s microalgae, and, if it’s a precision-fermented product, filtering the product from the microorganism. That cost adds up, and I feel it doesn’t get enough coverage in due diligence and in the media.

Whatever works at a two-liter scale, once you get to production scale, once the physics of biology hit, there’s really little you can do about it other than going back to the drawing board and doing more iterations. There’s no easy way to get around the scaling challenge.

One other thing that probably doesn’t get appreciated enough, especially if you’re cultivating a microorganism, is the effort it takes to avoid contaminating the samples. Whenever you open any culture containing microorganisms, sugar, and all the feedstocks, there are always microorganisms around us. They can come in and ruin everything. That is not a trivial thing to solve. It takes effort to control contamination because if you contaminate the sample, your whole batch is ruined. You have to start from the top, and cleaning is a pain in the ass.

Microorganisms are lazy. Energy-efficient is a better way to put it. If you’re using precision fermentation, you’re engineering it to make something it usually won’t make. They are not incentivized to make it because it takes a lot of energy to produce this dairy protein. Over time, the microorganisms that don’t make the whey protein make up most of the culture, and the ones that actually make the dairy protein are very few, because from an evolutionary standpoint, they’re incentivized not to make the dairy product. You just realize how energy-efficient these tiny creatures are, for better or worse.

You end up having these non-producers that make up most of the population. There’s this interesting company called Enduro Genetics3. Their fix for this global problem is to tie the microorganism’s survival to protein production. So if the microorganism doesn’t make the protein, it’s going to die. That’s the genetic switch that Enduro Genetics is making.

What the West misreads about Asia’s bioeconomy

Rhishi Pethe: You mentioned that investors in Hong Kong, or LPs who work in APAC, are more risk-averse compared to other places. What are some of the things that people like me, sitting in San Francisco, don’t understand about what’s happening there?

Eshan Samaranayake: I think Western media typically tends to overweigh invention but doesn’t cover scale as much. We’re at this stage in bio-manufacturing where technology is not the bottleneck. You have all these cool technologies, but how do you scale them and commercialize them?

Asia is the bio-manufacturing hub in terms of scale. China and India have already done that with biopharma. They’re the manufacturing hubs for biopharma. And now we’re getting to non-biopharma manufacturing, because India, with the BioE3 policy4, is investing heavily in bio-manufacturing. We definitely need more capacity for scaling up. There’s some cool stuff happening with BioMADE5, which is great. But generally, Asia tends to be the manufacturing hub, and I think that’s going to be the case for the bioeconomy as well.

When international investors look at Asia as an investable region for ag, they get carried away by the “TAM trap”. There are a few billion people here, so why not expand to this region and capture these markets? But the thing is, agriculture in Southeast Asia is run by smallholder farmers who don’t really have the money to spend on these innovations. So the TAM isn’t telling you the whole story. But who’s actually paying for these innovations? That’s still much smaller than what the TAM implies.

They say Southeast Asia is a big market, but that’s many different countries with their own distinct, localized markets, policies, value chain dynamics, and consumer patterns. So it’s very dangerous to bundle all these countries together. And we’re seeing local startups run into that same issue. There’s a great report by Beanstalk AgTech on local startups. Say there’s a startup in Thailand, they do well in Thailand, they’re gaining traction, and because VCs back them, they feel the need to expand into other regions, get that TAM. But what you do in Thailand you can’t replicate one-to-one in Vietnam or the Philippines. You have to build from the top again. So that’s probably less appreciated, even by local VCs. They tend to underestimate the complexity of these local markets.

One country I’m looking at closely is Thailand. They’ve had a national bioeconomy agenda since 20216, and not many people are talking about it. Thailand is very gifted from a natural-resource standpoint. It’s one of the largest sugar producers globally. And as you know, sugar is the feedstock of the bioeconomy, so if you can get the cost of sugar down, that’s already a big part of the COGS you’re addressing.

They also have government incentives to attract international companies to establish in Thailand, especially in biotech and biomanufacturing. They have these income tax exemptions, import duty relief for machinery and R&D equipment, and infrastructure cost write-offs for these designated biotech zones. So it’s not just a general investment promotion regime. It focuses on biomanufacturing in these biotech hubs.

That said, Thailand still has a way to go. One area where Thailand is falling short in bio-manufacturing compared to other countries in APAC is the regulatory side. There’s no novel ingredient that’s been approved there, unlike Singapore and Australia, where the regulation is robust, but they don’t really have cheap feedstock, definitely not Singapore.

Australia does have cheaper feedstock, but it doesn’t have these policies as favorably as Thailand does. So Thailand still has a way to go in terms of figuring out the regulations. They don’t have the playbook for incorporating these novel ingredients, but they definitely have the infrastructure in place to reach that stage.

Rhishi Pethe: You talked about feedstock and sugar, and whether it’s soy or glycerol, there are a bunch of other feedstocks that go into it. You mentioned that sugar prices are really important because they’re an input. So how do the unit economics of a fermentation startup actually work? What’s the incremental value they’re adding to make the unit economics work, if they’re very dependent on the price of feedstock?

Eshan Samaranayake: In terms of how much of the cost of production is influenced by feedstock, again, depending on the product, it can go up to 50%. They must bring down the cost of feedstock, whether that’s by using different feedstocks or by establishing operations near a region where they can easily access sugar.

You need the feedstock to make anything in the bioeconomy, and right now, sugar is the dominant feedstock. I don’t see that changing in the near future. Glycerol, or mycelium substrate, as you mentioned, we’re seeing early traction of companies trying out these different feedstocks to reduce cost, like food waste. Food waste as a feedstock is another big one. But at the end of the day, sugar is still the biggest input because it’s much more stable and not as crazy expensive as some others that are less available.

Rhishi Pethe: When you’re making an investment decision in a bioeconomy company, the feedstock price dictates a lot of their unit economics and profitability. What gives them alpha, or what gives them a competitive advantage compared to someone else?

Eshan Samaranayake: Feedstock is just part of the equation. But the more important end of the equation, for me, is how much of this feedstock you can convert into the end product. That comes down to strain optimization, mostly. If you have a microorganism that’s not very good at converting feedstock into the end product, that’s not very helpful. You use all the feedstock, but you aren’t getting the product you need. That’s the biggest lever startups are pulling.

The second lever is the scale. You can make this at a 2-liter scale, but can you achieve the same yield and productivity at a 10,000-liter scale? The yield and titer numbers at scale determine unit economics, not bench results. So when we evaluate a fermentation company, we spend most of our time on the biology. What is the conversion efficiency? What does the titer look like at relevant volumes, and how much does performance degrade as you scale up? And if they’re looking at using food waste as a feedstock, which is potentially cheaper than what you can get from commodity ingredients, that’s great. But we spend most of our time looking at the biology and how they’re utilizing the feedstock.

A third thing people underweigh, as I mentioned previously, is downstream processing. You can have excellent strain performance and still have poor unit economics if the separation, dewatering, or purification step is inefficient. For some products, downstream costs rival or exceed the fermentation cost itself. That is another source of real differentiation that does not show up in feedstock price comparisons.

Two companies using the same sugar at the same scale pay roughly the same price. What is proprietary is the biology, the strain library, the years of optimization work that gets you to a conversion efficiency your competitor cannot easily replicate.

Rhishi Pethe: There’s a commodity trader or large food company in the US who comes to you and says, “Hey, what should I be doing five years from now, given how the bioeconomy trend is going?”

Eshan Samaranayake: I think commodity traders have a real opportunity to be the feedstock providers for the bioeconomy. There’s an opportunity for them to transition from a commodity trader to a feedstock provider for industrial bioprocesses. And what used to be useless, some byproduct from farming that you couldn’t really sell for anything, all of a sudden, you now have microorganisms that could utilize this. So there’s also an opportunity to make good use of the waste products you previously discarded.

I’m seeing more companies in the bioeconomy trying to establish their bioreactors right next to farms or mills to have closer access to sugar. The thing about sugar and feedstock is that you have to look at the total cost of sugar. Transporting sugar is a big part of that total cost. So if they’re near a company like Cargill, they can reduce their feedstock costs. There is a mycelium-based company that Cargill has invested in, which has established its facilities next to a Cargill facility7, giving it near-term access to feedstock and exclusive agreements to supply the startup, allowing it to lock in that supply chain.

There are opportunities for them to move up the value chain rather than just be a commodity trader.

Cultivated meat’s reckoning

Rhishi Pethe: There have been a lot of cultivated meat startups and unicorns, and a lot of them have struggled to scale for various reasons. Singapore was among the first countries to approve cultivated meat almost five or six years ago. What has that experience taught the ecosystem about how much capital is needed and what kind of capital intensity is required? What has Singapore actually managed to prove, and what has it not proven?

Eshan Samaranayake: The first thing is that more people have more respect for the challenge of scaling any kind of bioprocess. Because people looked at the early numbers, maybe at a one-liter scale, and thought, oh, this will neatly translate into a production-scale bioreactor, but that clearly didn’t happen. They realized it wasn’t as straightforward as they’d thought.

And then you had these unicorn-cultivated-meat startups. They invested in all these big facilities even before they’d proven that their process could actually scale. They raised all this money and then felt the need to invest it. The way they invested was by buying all these heavy-capex facilities even before they’d proven out the fundamentals of their scaling. So that was a big miss on the technology side.

The other big issue is that most of these cultivated meat and seafood companies were targeting chicken and pork, not really high-value products. And if you’re competing with chicken producers, you have to bring your costs down to crazy amounts, which is impossible at the current scale they’re producing8. So the first issue is that they picked the wrong end product to target. Something like a high-value product, bluefin tuna, would have been a much better starting position than chicken. So, targeting the wrong thing at the start, and the physics of scaling up.

When these companies started, they were pitching 100% cultivated meat products. But when you look at what’s in the market right now, it’s mostly blended products, mostly plant-based, and less than 10% cultivated ingredients. It’s just the reality of the economics. There were clearly different expectations about where it would be in 5 or 10 years. It’s just about being more cautious about how hard it is to scale biology.

Singapore is the first country to approve cultivated meat for sale. What Singapore has proven is that you can eat these products. They’ve shown that with competent food safety regulators, you can approve these products in a reasonable time, so it’s not too long, where startups burn all their funding while waiting for approval. So they can do robust safety regulation in a reasonable time and show that these products are safe to eat. So they proved that these products are edible and real, not just a science project.

What Singapore didn’t prove is the commercial scale. There were a bunch of companies that sold the products in one store, but we didn’t really gain traction beyond that. So Singapore didn’t really prove that you can sell these products on a large commercial scale.

And then, maybe the strongest evidence of Singapore’s conviction in cultivated meat comes from their most recent food safety strategy in 2019: a “30 by 30” strategy, which is why they invested heavily in these alternative ingredient technologies. And now they’ve said that this is no longer part of their “30 by 30” strategy9, because it didn’t meet the consumer acceptance and cost targets they had in mind back in 2019. So they clearly shifted their focus. In my view, Singapore is no longer the cultivated meat hub in APAC. I think South Korea is taking that throne.

Most of the cultivated meat stars are now pivoting into cosmetics, which makes sense from a business standpoint, because you’re looking at a few grams and not the tons and kilograms you have to manufacture. Your unit economics are already attractive even at the earlier stages. So that’s much more reasonable.

So it’s just about being open about cultivated meat as a mainstream consumer product, being at least a decade out from what was pitched.

Rhishi Pethe: In a lot of biotech or robotics, proving out your concept and proving out the technology, maybe that’s a VC-funded model. But when you’re ready to scale, either you need distribution, or you need more manufacturing, a lot of times you can go to strategic capital from incumbents, instead of VCs continuing to put money in. Is that a realistic path to scale?

Eshan Samaranayake: I think that is the path. I don’t think it’s a good idea to use equity to buy capex. That’s not a good way to build a startup. But that’s what some of the earlier cultivated meat companies did. They raised a lot of money and then bought stainless steel with that capital, which is not the best use of equity. So you have to look at other sources of funding for that, like strategic capital.

When these cultivated-meat unicorn startups launched, they didn’t have the infrastructure to support them. We now have more CDMOs to help startups scale, but when they started, there was really nothing available, so they had no choice but to buy facilities and build bioreactors themselves. Now the ecosystem is much better because you have more enabling players, and these big manufacturing folks who have the bioreactors ready, and startups can come in and use them. So you have to be smarter about how you scale up, whether it’s partnering with CDMOs or using non-equity-based funding methods to get there.

When investors look at a cultivated meat or seafood company, they want to see how it’s going to get funded, not just in the next two years, but where the funding is coming from until they get to scale and start selling to consumers. Because you can no longer bank on the fact that we’ll raise funding now and then, 18 months later, we’ll raise again, it’s not as simple anymore. So, given this amount of funding, what reasonable milestones can you hit? And if you do hit those milestones, which investors would open up now that you’ve hit them? It’s not going to be those generalist investors. Probably a strategic or another sector-specific investor, and for them, you need to hit those milestones. So we’re seeing that investors are more cautious with capital, which is good, but they’re also more gated in terms of capital. We’ll give you the funding once you hit this milestone, and I’m not just going to take your word for it.

Rhishi Pethe: As a venture fund in 2026, what are some of the things you look at that have become more salient today compared to, say, three or four years prior?

Eshan Samaranayake: Increasingly, we have to identify the company’s acquirers. In 2021, people were at least considering IPOs for these companies. But when you look at the recent exit data for food and ag globally, it’s very clear that it’s almost all M&A, whether it’s a trade sale or a good exit. So we have to look at who will acquire this technology. What is the startup solving right now that an incumbent is having issues with, and does the startup have any contact with this incumbent? We’d like to see them having these early conversations. It doesn’t need to be a full LOI; let’s do a pilot together. Are they aware of the challenges an incumbent in their space is having? Coffee, for example, if you’re investing in an alternative coffee startup, are they aware of what UCC and the other coffee brands are facing? Because those are the folks who are going to buy your business. So we’re more and more cognizant about where the exits are going to come from.

We’re more and more cognizant about how the unit economics would work today, not once you get to scale. Once we get to scale, we’ll be price-competitive, but how about right now? What are you competitive with? You don’t have to compete on the commodity ingredient, but there could be a low-inclusion, high-value product you can still target and generate revenue today. So that’s why we invest in B2B platform technologies: they offer more optionality.

From a technology problem to an ecosystem problem

Rhishi Pethe: You talked about how you want the unit economics to work at each stage of scale. Let’s pick whatever commodity you want, sugar or soy. What happens to the demand curve of that particular commodity if the bioeconomy hits even a moderate scale? How does the demand curve change for that underlying ingredient or feedstock as these things scale?

Eshan Samaranayake: The example I keep coming back to is coffee. Coffee supply is at real risk of halving by 205010.

Maybe it’s halving, or 30% of the coffee supply is lost by 2050. These are structural issues that won’t be addressed soon, even as bio-manufactured ingredients reach scale and become cost-competitive. They’re going to be the commodity, and conventional coffee is going to be the specialty, where you have it very rarely, or it’s really expensive, because there’s less of it now than two decades ago. So that’s how that balance is going to shift. Of course, you have to get to scale, and you need all this capex to get there.

The roles are going to shift. The bio-manufactured thing is going to be the commodity. The conventional coffee is going to be the premium one, just because there’s less of it. Supply and demand, it’s going to be more expensive because of it.

But increasingly, we’re seeing more blended offerings. Coffee is another good example: one of our portfolio companies, Prefer11, is working with coffee companies to blend their coffee. So 50% Prefer’s dry coffee powder versus 50% conventional coffee powder, and apparently, consumers can’t tell the difference between real coffee and this blended product. So that helps address some of the supply chain volatility for the coffee companies while satisfying consumers. The blended route is another product line that will gain traction in the coming decades. It’s going to be a blend. It’s not going to be black and white.

Rhishi Pethe: When you start writing, you go in with a set of assumptions or ideas of what this is going to be and what you’re going to learn from it. Are there certain beliefs or ideas you had when you started that you feel are no longer true? What have you learned through that process?

Eshan Samaranayake: I started writing in 2023 as a learning experiment, and it still is. So I’m not saying I’ve reached a certain destination. I think it’s always going to be a process.

When I started, I was more naive. Because I come from a biotech background, I was maybe overly bullish about the role technology plays in a product’s success. So, my underlying belief when I started was that great technology and product-market fit are sufficient for a product’s success. What I think now is that, even more than the technology, does the value chain surrounding your target customer have the economic incentive to accommodate your technology? I know I said a lot of words there, but the point is, your technology in isolation doesn’t matter. The ecosystem you’re selling into also has to support your product for it to be adopted at scale. And if you don’t have that ecosystem supporting you, or that ecosystem isn’t ready, then a great product alone is not going to cut it. And if you’re trying to build the ecosystem while you’re selling the product, it requires an entirely different capital structure that VC won’t support. It’s just going to take a lot longer than you think.

In 2023, three years ago, when I started, I thought the sector had a technology problem. But in 2026, I don’t think we have a technology problem. I think we have an ecosystem problem. The science is working. What’s broken is this coordination architecture that helps products reach scale.

I am excited to restart the SFTW Convo series with the first conversation of 2026.

SVG Ventures | THRIVE is a Venture & Innovation Platform advancing the Food and Agriculture industries.

They work with leading corporations, startups, universities, and growers to solve the biggest challenges facing the food and agriculture sector.

SVG|THRIVE has worked with more than 15,000 startups across more than 100 countries.

Just before World Agritech 2026, I had the opportunity to sit down with John Hartnett, CEO and Founder of SVG|THRIVE, and Marion Meyer, Managing Director of Corporate Innovation, to discuss the state of innovation in the agrifood ecosystem.

Our conversation touched on the history and philosophy of SVG|THRIVE, the nature of innovation, how corporates can access outside innovation by working with startups, and the challenges and opportunities in that process, the big trends in agrifood as seen by SVG|THRIVE how the ecosystem is thinking about the adoption of AI, how corporates are ready (or not ready) for AI, and how SVG|THRIVE is reformulating its approach with a change in the pace of innovation.

We talked about whether agrifood is like a Bermuda Triangle, how an ecosystem model is like Tinder, and how international understanding and connections are critical for SVG|THRIVE.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did having it.

History of SVG Ventures|THRIVE

Rhishi Pethe: John, you founded SVG Ventures. What are some of the core principles that you follow? Initially, you said, “I want to connect Silicon Valley to Salinas Valley”. It’s 2026. Could you speak to your mission and how things are going?

John Hartnett: I’ve been in Silicon Valley for almost 30 years. I’ve had a front-row seat to companies like Google walking in as startups and watching them scale. I spent a decade building a smartphone company and interacting with the network here, the VCs, the corporates, the startups. Much of what became THRIVE came from that experience and what I see as the recipe for success.

When we founded THRIVE, we didn’t want to build a traditional fund that simply invests and takes board seats. We recognized that successful companies need more support in scaling, access to customers, capital, international markets, and the right talent and experience. Our goal was to build a platform that could deliver all of that.

Of course, the tip of the spear is investment. That’s our main pillar. Ultimately, everything we do leads to investment outcomes, and today we’re investing through two funds: our Pioneer Fund and our Sunrise Fund.

Our second pillar is venture development. We help startups grow at scale through programs that meet them at different stages, from our venture studio at the earliest phase to our academy and through to our flagship accelerator. We work with startups from idea to Series A. Entrepreneurs learn best from other entrepreneurs. It’s not about lectures or theory. It’s about lived experience and navigating the journey firsthand. Our venture development platform is built around that principle.

The third pillar is the ecosystem and network. It’s connecting key people who will be influential in the scaling and success of companies, including board members, customers, investors, growers, and farmers. We’ve found this to be particularly critical in the food supply chain. It’s one of the oldest industries in the world, yet it remains highly fragmented and difficult to navigate.

One of the things we joked about when we were looking at how to connect the dots between Salinas and Silicon Valley was that entrepreneurs and farmers aren’t hanging out in San Francisco, drinking cappuccinos together. They operate in very different worlds, so the question becomes, how do you connect them? In the Bay Area, the power of networks is evident: look at the founders of Google, the connections at Kleiner Perkins with John Doerr, the connections with Bill Campbell and Eric Schmidt, and the relationships among all the players there. People call it an ecosystem; you can call it a network. We use both. It’s about connecting key people who will be influential in the scaling and success of companies. That’s a network in action. We wanted to create one for food and ag.

Our fourth pillar is engaging with corporates. In food and ag, significant exits tend to be trade sales, rather than IPOs, making corporates crucial, whether as customers or strategic investors. The most forward-thinking corporates recognize that innovation doesn’t just happen within their own walls. They actively look outside for disruption and new ideas. That includes start-ups, as well as industry peer connections within or beyond their own sector.

Those four pillars are what hold up our platform.

I live in Silicon Valley, an hour from fields, farmers, and some of the biggest players in specialty crops, but we still weren’t connected. And at the time, the food industry continues to face challenges, whether known or not, related to water, labor, climate adaptation, and climate change.

So I spent time early on with Bruce Taylor, chairman and founder of Taylor Farms, and Dennis Donohue, then mayor of Salinas, and we looked at how to bridge the gap. And we really took the approach of calling this where we are, like the Golden Triangle: Silicon Valley technology and investment to the west; the capital of fresh food and wine to the south and north; UC Davis, one of the world’s top agricultural universities, to the east. That’s where we wanted to bring it all together. And the formula we developed to address it is those four key areas: startups, ecosystem, corporations, and investment.

Ecosystem dynamics

Rhishi Pethe: You mentioned the ecosystem, innovation, how startups learn from others, and how entrepreneurs learn from other entrepreneurs. You mentioned the golden triangle. Right now, AgTech feels more like the Bermuda Triangle than the Golden Triangle.

Marion, you worked at corporates. You are physically thousands of miles away from Silicon Valley in Germany. When you think about ecosystems and innovation, could you characterize what you consider good innovation? What are some of the friction points that you see between startups and corporates?

Marion Meyer: Good innovation always starts with the same questions: What are you trying to achieve with innovation, and what are you solving for your customers? What does success look like?

Corporates have ongoing operations to sustain, but they also need to drive into the future. Those who have managed both areas have lasted for decades. But the speed of innovation has changed dramatically. What took 20 to 30 years in the last century now happens in three to five years or faster. So one of the most important things a corporation can do is ask: what are the topics that – even if they seem far away from core – could have an influential impact on our operations and value proposition? Where is the threat, and where is the opportunity?

Historically, a lot of innovation happened inside corporations, inventing new products and processes by their own teams –and that was sufficient. Today, a lot of great innovation is also coming from entrepreneurs building something new outside established companies and working across multiple technologies, which often aren’t part of the corporation’s DNA. The question becomes: how do we identify what is strategically relevant, gain access to it, and engage in ways that meaningfully impact the business?

For startups, the challenge is similar. They might have a great idea, passion, and the right moat to develop it and bring it to the market – but one can very rarely solve all challenges and access all growth steps alone. They could benefit enormously from other players, such as corporates, for deep market knowledge, existing infrastructure, and decades of customer access. But they often don’t know which door to knock on, or who to talk to.

Getting your own agenda clear, as a startup, a corporate, or an investor, is a prerequisite. And having someone who can enable and facilitate the collaboration, who understands both perspectives and can spot where the fit is, is invaluable.

Let me give an example. In one of my former companies, we experienced great excitement in the team about innovation and new technology. But often, innovators landed at various points of contact within the company, and employers were interested but had no real mandate (nor the time or process) to act on them. They’d do nothing, reject engagement, or pass it along inside the company, say “this is interesting,” and nothing would happen. We then launched an open innovation initiative and made ourselves visible and accessible to the outside world. Suddenly, startups had a real door to knock on. It is not just an email address, but someone who would look at it and respond. And we had a funnel and process created to ensure we were seeing, filtering, and reviewing the interesting ones for us. What is crucial for success is identifying the topics and partners you really want to engage with. Finding the path from idea to objective to action is everything.

Corporates, Corporate Venture, and Innovation

Rhishi Pethe: John, when you talked about access, it’s not just access to corporates for startups, it’s access to startups for a big company. Marion, you’re seeing the pace of innovation accelerate. John, how are corporates actually keeping an eye on what’s happening within the ecosystem, which startups are working on what, and what are the trends? Setting up a corporate venture capital fund was one mechanism. But we are seeing a pullback. FMC shut down its corporate venture fund. Other corporate venture funds have not made many investments. Do you see that their current approach is reasonable?

John Hartnett: Venture capital has been one of the first avenues many corporates have explored, often through setting up their own CVC. They gain tremendous insights by doing this, but alternatively, they can invest in independent VC funds.

The CVC Avenue is expensive and risky because corporates aren’t just looking for financial returns. They are seeking strategic value, including deeper market understanding, early visibility into disruptions and emerging trends, key areas to address proactively, and potential acquisition opportunities. They also want access to information, to the hottest startups, and financial upside.

Finding the right startup is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Corporates often don’t have the luxury to dig through that haystack. That’s why they’re leaning into organizations like ours. Over the past decade, we’ve built a network of 15,000 startups across more than 100 countries. That didn’t happen overnight. But we’ve also built an intelligence layer on top of it. We don’t just know who these companies are; we’ve engaged with them. We’ve accelerated over 300 of them. When you evaluate a company, technology is essential, but you’re also looking at the team, the traction, the problem they’re solving. And not every corporate partner wants to invest or acquire. Driscoll’s, for instance, isn’t looking to buy companies. Instead, they want to solve real-world problems around water, irrigation, and labor.

Rhishi Pethe: So you are doing matchmaking between corporates and startups. It’s like Tinder for innovation, I guess?

John Hartnett: If we take the Tinder analogy, before you get married, you date, you get engaged, then you commit. Nobody gets married on day one. Our accelerator programs de-risk the engagement cycle. We’re working with these startups for months, sometimes years. You get to “date” the people and the companies for a time before committing to anything.

Rhishi Pethe: You guys mentioned that you help corporate executives identify which startups to engage with, depending on their needs, thanks to your strong network. If you flip the question, not every startup can work with every corporate client. What is the process for saying, “You should work with these one or two corporates because they’re a better fit for the startup”? How does the reverse matchmaking work?

Marion Meyer: The better we know a startup, the better we can judge whether there’s a genuine fit with a particular corporate, because they are solving or supporting exactly what this corporate needs or is looking for.

We start by getting to know the startup deeply, what they’re doing, and how it fits a real market need on the customer’s or corporate side. We have different programs depending on the stage of the start-up, which allow us to do this, especially our accelerator, challenges, and immersion programs. We also recently launched a Scale-Up Assessment. It is a structured deep dive that examines a startup’s setup, organization, solution, and go-to-market strategy and identifies gaps, risks, and opportunities for the next phase of growth. And enablers and potential partners for commercialization and growth, such as Corporates.

On the other side, we spend a significant amount of time with each corporate partner to understand their strategic priorities and innovation needs. We listen carefully but also offer an outside-in perspective. For corporates who are still early in their innovation journey or want to review their existing activities, we offer an innovation assessment to help build the process, set priorities, and sharpen scouting areas.

For more advanced organizations, we execute through structured briefings and ongoing reviews to ensure continuity across innovation pathways while allowing for flexibility and adaptation.

Sometimes a fit between start-up and Corporate might be seen via a pre-identified scouting area; sometimes a fit appears as an unforeseen solution, for instance, when it hasn’t been on the radar of a particular technology search. Still, it provides a desired solution from an unexpected track.

Trendspotting

Rhishi Pethe: John, you have worked with 15,000 startups over the last 10-15 years and have talked with many corporates. Your team will have a front-row seat to current trends and what these amazing entrepreneurs and corporates are thinking.

What are some of the two or three trends that everybody is always curious about? Here in San Francisco, if you don’t mention AI, people think you are a psychopath.

Could you speak to the broader macro trends in the sector and then explain how AI fits into them?

John Hartnett: Technology follows big problems. That’s why we remain passionate and excited about food, agriculture, and climate. The big problems out there today will unlock the big technology solutions.

On one side, you have resource scarcity, arable land, water, energy, and labor, which significantly affect production. At the same time, we’re seeing the cumulative effects of fires, droughts, and extreme weather on production. We’ve also seen our supply chains be very fragile. We went through COVID, showing us how quickly empty shelves can appear. We’ve seen the effects of geopolitical conflicts, which have increased food costs significantly in many areas. On the other side, health and nutrition have become central to how people think about what they eat. Yet the US still has some of the highest obesity rates in the world. These are the big challenges to tackle.

For us, breaking it down into actionable innovation themes means looking at it from a deep-tech perspective.

The first major trend we’re watching is the intersection of biology and AI. Companies like Heritable, a spin-out from Google, are working on programming plants to address resource scarcity, reduce climate effects, and deliver more nutritious food. That deep-tech intersection feels like one of the biggest opportunities of our lifetime.

The second big thing is physical AI. AI applied to robotics and automation. Physical AI will unlock solutions to real-world agricultural challenges much faster than many expect. And it will attract major tech players to this space in ways we haven’t seen yet. Software eats the world, right? But when that software evolves beyond digital confines and enters the physical world, it will be eating faster.

Then, I think this is always up for debate, and I’m still in the camp that CEA farming is going to get to the other side of the bridge here. I know the timing hasn’t been right. The economics of running large-scale facilities haven’t been penciled out yet. But I keep coming back to smartphones. Everyone thinks that the story started in 2007 with the iPhone. It started a decade earlier. The timing and technology just weren’t aligned. You needed compute power that fit in your hand, and networks fast enough to support it. None of that happened overnight. Apply that same lens to where we are with agrifood and AI, and I think the timing is now to support it.

Big tech’s engagement in AI applied to life sciences, agrifood, and climate has been tentative so far. Google’s Mineral was a compelling experiment, but it didn’t represent a full commitment to the sector. Microsoft has dipped a toe in, but none of the major AI players, such as NVIDIA and AMD, have truly engaged. I think that changes with physical AI, and when it does, you’ll see these sectors light up in a significant way in a two-to-five-year window. The more big tech gets into this sector, the bigger the opportunity, the faster it’s going to happen.

There’s been a lot of hype in AgriFoodTech, but that hasn’t always translated into strong outcomes. We saw a similar dynamic during the early internet era: from 1998 to 2001, all you needed was “dotcom” in your name for valuations to skyrocket. But out of that came Google and Yahoo. I joke a little bit that after COVID hit in 2022, investors acted like drunken sailors, investing from home because they thought agrifood was a hot area, but they didn’t fully understand it. Yet I do believe that out of the current hype cycle will come some of the biggest companies in agrifood. And those companies that come out the other side will be the ones built to last.

Corporate Innovation

Rhishi Pethe: It’s a good parallel you drew to the internet or the smartphone. We’ll see much more movement and development in this area over the next 2-5 years, especially in AI. If I’m a corporate, I need to be ready to take advantage of it. Marion, when you talk to different corporates, how much of the amazing innovation coming through AI are they able to take advantage of? And how ready do you think they are when some of the things that John is talking about will start to pick up the pace even more? And if they’re not ready, what are the gaps? How do you help them figure that out?

Marion Meyer: Every corporate I speak to is experimenting, and that’s exactly right. But it’s important to understand that “AI” isn’t one single topic for a corporation. It operates across multiple layers, and you have to manage them deliberately.

The first layer is AI for organization and process, tools that apply broadly, regardless of sector, to how you work internally. This is where adoption is the hardest challenge. AI isn’t a typical system rollout. You don’t implement a tool and tick the box. You have to change behavior, culture, and processes, and the way people think about and use these tools. The journey has started, but it’s far from over.

The second layer is AI applied to differentiating processes. Your R&D, your time-to-market, your cost of production. These have real competitive implications. And the third layer is AI in the products and services you build for customers.

There’s still a meaningful opportunity, particularly in internal R&D and operational functions that aren’t traditionally IT-focused. Most organizations are still in the early stages of mapping out what AI can and should actually do for those teams. Two practical things can help. First, set priorities rather than trying to do everything at once. Identify the core layers, make tool choices, and bring your teams along properly. Second, be deliberate about data. Know what’s proprietary, what you’re willing to share, and in what context. If you try to protect everything, you limit your ability to use the most powerful tools. If you carelessly give away your proprietary data, you may put an asset at risk or create a dependency. Getting that clarity is foundational.

We support Corporates and Start-ups also in the arena of AI-driven innovation. One element is curated networking for our partners – in dedicated roundtables, we bring industry players together to exchange insights on initiatives, challenges, and best practices, as well as perspectives on the most impactful developments. We add external speakers to provide insights and inspiration, and we bring the tech industry into that conversation. In 2025, we initiated an AI & Automation roundtable, and we will have the next one alongside the Global Impact Summit 2026. In addition, we are launching complementary AI-focused innovation services. With those services, we can help companies find and understand the right starting point, put curiosity to use in use cases, and drive value.

EU vs. the US

Rhishi Pethe: Because you’re from Europe, I have to ask you this question. Sitting here in Silicon Valley, some people look down on Europe for its regulation and how it deals with innovation.

Does that question come up in your conversations with corporates or startups? You’re in Germany, you shut down a bunch of nuclear plants, and people criticize it over here. What can the US, or US ag tech or agri-food tech, learn from the European approach to innovation? What are your inputs on that when it comes to SVG|THRIVE?

Marion Meyer: First of all, many ideas, challenges, and approaches around innovation we talked about are shared within corporates and start-ups, independent from the individual markets and regions they are operating in. Most companies already operate globally or plan to do so. That’s why support is not limited to regional experience but could also benefit from additional lenses and insights into other markets.

We do see specific regulation and sustainability requirements in Europe. They do slow down innovation in some respects. There’s no doubt about that. But they can also be a trigger for it. When a regulation effectively says “you can’t do this anymore,” it creates real pressure to find an alternative. Business finds a way, like water finding its path. Frankly, that kind of pressure often drives more durable innovation than subsidies do.

The second thing Europe offers is deep industrial and engineering competence. When we talk about physical AI and automation, Europe and Germany in particular have decades of robotics and manufacturing expertise embedded in both corporations and universities. When that hardware and process knowledge combine with software capabilities, much of which comes from the US, the results can be very powerful. We’re already seeing that with unmanned aviation and geospatial data. In the Munich ecosystem, for example, we are seeing a wave of drone and related technology startups driven by dual-use applications, and the underlying knowledge transfer may directly benefit agriculture.

Third, Europe’s diversity can actually be seen as an asset. Europe is facing pricing challenges as dozens of distinct markets operate within a shared economic framework. A company that learns to scale across Europe has learned something genuinely hard. That capability translates globally.

Silicon Valley is SVG’s headquarters, but it’s a global team, and team members are also deeply embedded in the Canadian market, in Ireland, across Europe. We’re connected to ecosystems around the world, which enables us to understand different markets, bridge regions, and match technology to local use cases.

John Hartnett: Global reach is a non-negotiable for us. Seventy percent of the 15,000 startups we engage with are outside the US. We’ve taken what we call the A7 approach, focusing on the seven most important agrifood markets globally.

Evolution of the SVG Model

Rhishi Pethe: John. You’ve been in this space for more than 10 years. People talk about how one-person teams or two-person teams can scale ARR very quickly. Do some of those principles apply to the sector that you’re working in? If yes, how do you see the SVG|THRIVE model evolving over the next five years?

John Hartnett: The model is already evolving. When we started, we were very focused upstream. As we’ve looked at where technology has the greatest impact across the food system, the frame has expanded. It’s now genuinely farm-to-fork. We’ve broadened our focus over the past few years to reflect that, and now we include downstream, supply chain, and delivery technologies.

We’ve also leaned much more heavily into climate and sustainability. We launched our Global Impact Initiative in 2020, specifically to help corporates deliver on the ambitious 2030 and 2050 sustainability targets they’ve committed to. That’s a growing part of our work.

Another key area is deep tech, given its ability to address challenges across ag, food, life sciences, supply chain, and related areas. It’s largely sector-agnostic. Something that solves a problem in the food supply chain may also solve a problem in construction or another industry. We’re continuing to refine our investment thesis, putting deep tech in focus as a solution for planetary health, human health, and supply chain resilience.

In parallel, our focus is to scale our investment platform. To date, we’ve primarily invested at the Seed and Series A stages, deploying approximately $100 million. We see a significant opportunity to expand this further. The market opportunity clearly supports it.

Rhishi Pethe: Thank you, John and Marion, for your time today and your work for making it easier to bring innovations to market at scale.