Last week Plug and Play (PnP) held their semi-annual Summit in Sunnyvale. It was a great week with 3,500 – 4,000 attendees hearing from thought leaders, startups, and investors about what’s going on with venture capital both generally and in specific segments like AgTech and FoodTech. It was super cool to see AgTech absolutely own the day three agenda this year with a full set of AgTech topics and startups showing off cool new AgTech solutions.

Western Growers is working with Plug and Play on a couple of key initiatives related to the biggest challenges for specialty crop growers: the increasing cost of labor and the increasing regulatory concerns about chemical inputs such as pesticides and herbicides.

• The Startup Intake Form is the new front door to WG members. There are over 2,000 automation and chemistry efficiency/alternatives (biologicals, genetics, regenerative agriculture, UV light, precision spraying) startups and over 2,300 WG members. There is no way that those numbers can work efficiently if every grower has to work on filtering out the startups in those two segments to find the ones that have a high likelihood of commercialization and success. The better path is to have Plug and Play and Western Growers work together to vet the startups for the entire WG membership. The way startups can gain entry into that process is by entering their data in the form above. It takes roughly the same amount of time as completing an Accelerator application (that should not be a surprise, Plug and Play is one of the world’s largest Accelerators).

• Global Scouting – PnP provides global scouting services on behalf of WG members. Once startups in key categories are identified and vetted, PnP and WG work together to spread the word on the new startups that have been vetted so WG members get a filtered set of startups out of the 2,000+ (and there are more in other tech segments. These are just the two most pressing issues). In the past couple of months, PnP has supported a Chinese scouting trip of robotic solutions and AgTech automation solutions and helped scout startups for the Ag Sharks competition at the WG Annual Meeting. In addition, PnP scouting led to multiple quality meetings for me at the Summit, including Molecularworks.bio and Lilliput Technologies, both of which were new to me.
• I mentioned Ag Sharks above. Ag Sharks returned to the WG Annual Meeting agenda last year after a year hiatus. It is a Shark Tank style format that puts multiple startups in front of multiple Ag Sharks (AgTech investors). It’s one of the highlights of the Annual Meeting for Western Growers members. That was true in the original format with a single Ag Shark (S2G). It is also true in the new format with multiple Ag Sharks. In addition to providing an Ag Shark, PnP provides scouting services for startups that combine a high likelihood of commercialization success with startups that have a “sizzle” factor in terms of either the type of solution they offer or something else that creates some intrigue about the startup. This year we are working on investor syndicate options for the Ag Sharks to include potential investment funds from other investors and/or WG members that would like to participate.
• Farm Robotics Challenge – this is the fifth year of the Farm Robotics Challenge, which was launched by Farm-NG and partners, including Western Growers. Each year there are more teams competing, and the bar gets higher each year. The winners were announced at the event, and I will provide details on the winners in a separate post. For now, from a specialty crops perspective, the two big winners were UC Davis and Cornell. We are going to work with them and last year’s winner (University of Georgia) to really start to focus more effort on commercialization.
• This item is a future aspirational objective that we are slowly moving down the path toward. The reduction in AgriFoodTech VC by 70% in the last four years has forced everyone in the space to develop new strategies to help fill the VC capital gap. PnP and WG are looking at collaborative approaches to capital that could include PnP VC funds, strategic partner funds from companies in the ag and AgTech ecosystems such as OEMs and input manufacturers, and industry funding sources (including growers and trade groups). Ideally there would be some matching fund possibilities from public funding sources. We have nothing to report yet but are evaluating potential options in this segment.

As I mentioned above, Plug and Play holds these Summits twice a year. The summer one is normally in June (it was in May this year because of a schedule conflict with the overall World Cup schedule that includes games in Santa Clara at Levi’s Stadium in June). This would have made hotel rooms a lot harder to get and more expensive so PnP moved the summer event to May this year. The winter event is generally in November. This year’s will be November 3-5 and will once again be in Sunnyvale at PnP HQ.

If you are a WG member that would like to attend, please reach out to the WG Innovation team and we can help. The main reasons to attend are:

• Get a clear and current perspective on the issues and startups that are central to the industry discussion. There are dedicated AgTech and FoodTech segments where you can see what is happening in specific areas of each of those two segments.
• Get current on other segments that are not AgTech related but are large and/or emerging technology areas such as cybersecurity and AI. Some of these technologies will likely enable vertical solutions to advance faster by leveraging the horizontal tech solutions with industry-specific solutions like AgTech.

Thanks to our friends at Plug and Play for another great Summit!