Radicle Growth and Nutrien Announce New Inclusive Agriculture Partnership Launching in 2022
SAN DIEGO, Calif. – December 16th, 2021. Radicle Growth, a company-building platform for early-stage agriculture and food technologies is proud to announce a new Inclusive Agriculture partnership with Nutrien, the world’s largest provider of crop inputs and services. The partnership, including an Inclusion Challenge set to launch in 2022, will focus on catalysing actions within the agri-food sector to increase the level of venture capital invested in Women and Black, Indigenous & People of Color (BIPOC) entrepreneurs, with the goal of helping increase awareness and address the challenges limiting access to early-stage capital among these historically underrepresented groups.
Addressing the Early-Stage Funding Gap
As part of a discovery effort to support its partnership with Nutrien, Radicle Growth will engage with Women and BIPOC entrepreneurs globally in the months ahead. Radicle will develop an inclusive overview of today’s reality for this important group of innovators, as well as a framework and support program designed to allow this reservoir of largely untapped potential in early-stage investing to capture opportunities historically unavailable to them. The opportunity is clear, Women founders across all industries raised only 2.2% of all US deployed venture capital funding in the first half of 2021, with BIPOC groups accounting for just 1.2%.* Radicle’s objective is to ensure that findings generated through these efforts will serve the entire agri-food industry with trends, insights and key actions that can also translate across all sectors.
Inclusion Challenge with Nutrien
In the Spring of 2022, Nutrien and Radicle will launch an inclusion challenge designed to seek-out and invest in founders and innovators developing agriculture and food technologies, within companies led by Women and BIPOC entrepreneurs. An investment will ultimately be made in the two best technologies or companies, as selected by a panel of industry experts. In addition to supporting two great platforms, the challenge will seek to provide and make available market intelligence in the area of inclusion and diversity across the ag- and food-tech sectors, with the goal of providing useful, aggregated insights into how access can be improved for underrepresented groups to obtain the capital, mentorship and resources they need to be successful. Further details of the Inclusion Challenge with Nutrien will be announced in Spring, 2022.
Kirk Haney, Managing Partner with Radicle Growth, said: “As COP26 illustrated so recently, our food value chain has a responsibility to become more efficient, with a climate-positive impact on the world. By increasing the diversity of talent working on this problem, we surely increase the probability of bringing transformative technologies to market to address the issues facing the planet.”
Mark Thompson, EVP and Chief Strategy & Sustainability Officer at Nutrien, said: “The agriculture industry has a critical role to play in leading systemic global change and innovation that support a prosperous future for people and the planet. At Nutrien, our Feeding the Future Plan sets out 2030 commitments that we’re acting on to lead the way forward, including our focus on Inclusive Agriculture. By applying an inclusion lens to investment and the adoption of early-stage technologies, we see the potential to create sustainable value for growers by reducing barriers to equitable and inclusive access in our operations, fields and supply chains. I’m thrilled that Radicle shares our vision and we’re excited to meet our Challenge participants next year.”
For more information, or to register for updates on this project, visit us today.
*Note: Statistics regarding the level of investment deployed to women and BIPOC entrepreneurs is based on a H1 2021 report issued by Crunchbase.
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Media Contacts
- For Radicle Growth – Damaris Mozo, Director of Operations – dmozo@radicle.vc
- For Nutrien – Joan Wickham, Director, CEO & Corporate Communications – Brand & Culture Communications – 970-889-2438
About Radicle Growth
Radicle Growth selects innovative, early-stage companies for investment, ensuring that disruptive ag tech & food tech companies reach their full potential. In addition to providing seed-stage capital, Radicle Growth provides a fertile environment for visionaries in the ag and food space to flourish. Their proprietary platform is one of a kind in the ag and food industry, filling a huge void in the market by identifying the most innovative technologies and accelerating them with a range of value-creation initiatives. To connect and learn more about Radicle Growth follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.
About Nutrien
Nutrien is the world’s largest provider of crop inputs and services, playing a critical role in helping growers increase food production in a sustainable manner. We produce and distribute approximately 27 million tonnes of potash, nitrogen and phosphate products world-wide. With this capability and our leading agriculture retail network, we are well positioned to supply the needs of our customers. We operate with a long-term view and are committed to working with our stakeholders as we address our economic, environmental and social priorities. The scale and diversity of our integrated portfolio provides a stable earnings base, multiple avenues for growth and the opportunity to return capital to shareholders.
