For much of the past decade, agtech has often faced a structural mismatch between real agricultural problems, slow farm-level adoption, and venture capital impatient for tech‑style growth curves.
According to Po Bronson, general partner at deep‑tech investor SOSV and managing director of biotech accelerator IndieBio SF, that contradiction could be breaking apart.
Speaking with AgTechNavigator at the recent World Agri‑Tech Innovation Summit in San Francisco, Bronson suggests that the very forces destabilising agriculture – climate volatility, margin pressure, and rising input costs – are the same forces that could finally accelerate demand for transformative agtech solutions.
“I’m betting on the chaos factor going up,” he said, with the pain in the system getting so severe that people are finally going to be open to “new stuff”.
“Worse than ever” on the farm
While agrifoodtech venture funding has been in downturn for well over a year, Bronson believes the mood on farms in 2026 tells a very different story.
“Farmers and growers are telling us it’s worse than ever,” he said. “Crop insurance has gone up eight times the rate of inflation since 2020.”
Rising insurance costs, combined with persistently high fertiliser prices following geopolitical conflict in the Middle East, have left many growers “frozen and in a panic”.
“They don’t know what to do,” Bronson said. “You cannot depend on anything anymore.”
Even consumer staples betray the fragility of the system. “Something as simple as biscuits don’t taste like they did when I was a kid,” he noted. “That’s because Canadian soft winter wheat isn’t available anymore due to drought. Other wheat doesn’t taste the same.”
For Bronson, these shifts underscore a deeper reality: climate change is already reshaping what can be grown, where and how reliably.
Why venture capital alone won’t fix it
Despite agriculture’s mounting challenges, Bronson is blunt about why traditional venture capital is failing to fill the innovation gap.
“Most venture dollars dedicated to ag are frozen by an existing portfolio of sideways‑running companies that are not scaling at the speed they forecast,” he said. “Their valuations aren’t going up, so funds are nursing portfolios rather than backing new companies.”
The result is that very few new agtech start‑ups are getting funded.
More fundamentally, Bronson argues, venture capital is structurally misaligned with agriculture.
“Venture is only 8% of global private capital,” he said. “Yet agtech has been built on the myth that this is a VC‑driven business. It’s not.”
Agriculture, he insists, needs capital willing to accept moderate, reliable returns, not moonshot multiples.
“A company in ag needs to work with VCs, but also with other forms of private capital seeking a different return profile,” he said. “The astronomical sky-high valuations we used to hear talked about are just gone.”
Bringing other capital out of the shadows
Bronson believes the next phase of ag innovation will depend on their being the infrastructure to mobilise capital that has historically stayed out of the spotlight: family offices, wealth managers, sovereign wealth funds, farm banks, and corporates.
He points to SOSV portfolio company Tidal Vision as a case in point. The company’s ag revenues are expected to hit $22 million this year, up from $12 million last year – but its most recent large funding round was not VC‑led.
“The investors were money management firms working with family offices and big banks managing private wealth,” Bronson said. “There was not a lot of VC money in there.”
What’s missing, he argues, is a “railroad” – a system that allows private capital to flow into ag with realistic expectations.
“We need a way to say: we can get you a 3x return in a few years,” he said, “not 10x or 30x like VCs are looking for.”
That shift, Bronson believes, is already underway, driven not by enthusiasm, but by necessity.
Betting on rare winners, not trends
Bronson’s own investment strategy reflects this reality. He doesn’t chase sectors or trends; he looks for standout companies that can reach revenue and profitability quickly.
“I have to do companies I can get into revenue fast and break even very fast,” he said. “I want them to be profitable on $5 million or less.”
Once a company takes larger VC rounds, he warns, the clock starts ticking. “You’re on an escalator,” he said. “I want to be patient and get it to the stage where real money comes in, and then it can grow at that speed.”
Challenging the grip of the big seed players
That patience is also shaping how Bronson thinks about disruption, particularly in seeds.
He believes the dominance of the “big four” seed companies has slowed innovation at precisely the moment agriculture needs it most.
“These are mature businesses being squeezed for cash, not sprinting innovators,” he said. “They want one percent improvement per year. Radical innovation can jump all of that.”
Litigation exposure around herbicides has further constrained risk‑taking, he argues, making space for new entrants with different technical approaches.
One example is Avalo, an SOSV‑backed company using artificial intelligence and machine learning to develop climate‑resilient crops with dramatically lower water, fertiliser and chemical requirements.
This represents exactly the kind of high‑risk, high‑conviction, world‑reshaping deep tech that excites Bronson.
Rethinking sacred cows – especially CRISPR
Bronson is also unapologetically sceptical of some technologies long touted as ag’s saviour.
CRISPR, he states, is “holding back total market value. “You can’t make much change to your crops this way. CRISPR has had almost no impact on our system.”
Climate stress, he argues, is exposing the limits of incremental gene edits.
“If there’s not much rain on the Rocky Mountains, it means there’s not much in the aquifer which means all those crops fed by the aquifer are salty.” You don’t need an edited crop, he argues – you need a new crop.
That’s where chaos comes in. “To some extent, I’m betting on the chaos factor going up, so the stranglehold of certain ideas dissipates, and people will be open to new stuff.”
Adoption follows pain
Importantly, Bronson is not betting on the collapse of incumbents.
“That would be a mistake,” he said. “They’re impenetrable in corn and soy.”
Instead, he’s betting that climate change is quietly redrawing the agricultural map. As growing regions move north, entirely new seeds will be required – 90‑day corn, 90‑day wheat – varieties that don’t yet exist.
The light units in Canada haven’t changed, he points out. But the heat has. That means you need entirely new genetics.
Those gaps, Bronson believes, represent the real opportunity.
He is not betting on disruption for disruption’s sake. “I’m betting only that the pain in the system makes people adopt new stuff.”
