H.A.R.V.E.S.T. AgTech is giving four local start-ups a big boost

The global innovation incubator is supporting seven companies pursuing innovations that can help cut back on chemical inputs in agriculture.

by Eric Schmid April 16, 2026

St. Louis-based companies pursuing cutting-edge agricultural innovation are leading the way in a new program designed to incubate novel technology in that space.

Four of the seven companies in H.A.R.V.E.S.T. AgTech’s inaugural cohort, announced Thursday morning, are based in the Gateway Region, with the other three having roots in California, Massachusetts, and the United Kingdom. 

Lupe Gamez views a sample of Drosophila suzukii through a microscope in an Agragene lab. The files are key to the St. Louis based-company's pest control solution for fruit corps.

St. Louis-based companies pursuing cutting-edge agricultural innovation are leading the way in a new program designed to incubate novel technology in that space.

Four of the seven companies in H.A.R.V.E.S.T. AgTech’s inaugural cohort, announced Thursday morning, are based in the Gateway Region, with the other three having roots in California, Massachusetts, and the United Kingdom. 

The program, which spun out of a prior national innovation incubator and is now administered by the St. Louis-based nonprofit Yield Lab Institute, provides a non-dilutive award to selected companies, as well as connection to technical research partners at the North Carolina Plant Science Initiative and University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. 

Yield Lab Institute executive director Stephanie Regagnon says that last part is key, as participating companies will come away with data validated by credible third-party institutions. 

“It’s a different kind of offering in terms of an accelerator program, but it’s truly unique in the marketplace,” she says. “That kind of data and proof from a research entity such as these two really helps in their future fundraising and also credibility with growers or their other end users.”

Regagnon says this first cohort of companies, which includes the locally based Agragene, Impetus Agriculture, NewLeaf Symbiotics, and Pluton Biosciences, are all developing innovation centered on “biologicals.” 

“Basically, it’s a broad category of inputs where we’re using organisms to be able to help improve agricultural productivity in a way that will either complement, or, in some cases, lessen dependency on agricultural chemical inputs,” says Morven McLean, inaugural director of the food and agriculture research mission at WashU. She also was on the 13-member H.A.R.V.E.S.T. external advisory board that ultimately decided which companies would be included in this cohort.

McLean says it was challenging for her and others to choose the seven winners. For her part, she says she was looking for companies that had solid data from well-designed experiments and clearly formed proofs of concept or paths to commercialization.

The question, she says, was whether the companies had “really thought that through and understood, or at least planned for, the externalities that can impact whether or not something can progress to market.” She adds, “You may have a very good product concept, but are there constraints to being able to actually have that move into the marketplace and be accessed by farmers and growers?”

Another important consideration was how potential companies would leverage being a part of H.A.R.V.E.S.T. and the access to field sites it affords, McLean says.

A view of sterile Drosophila suzukii males developed by St. Louis-based Agragene to control a common pest of fruit crops. The male flies are gene edited to be sterile and prevent wild females from reproducing.

A good example of the potential benefits is Agragene, which is pursuing a solution to control one of the worst insect pests: spotted wing drosophila. 

“This is an invasive fruit fly,” says Agragene CEO Bryan Witherbee. “It’s the number one global pest for soft-skin fruits: raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, cherries, strawberries, and even now peaches.” 

Using gene-editing, the St. Louis-based startup has developed a way to grow sterile male flies as a way to curb the population of the pest, says Agragene director of research and development Stephanie Gamez.

“The cool part is, these insects, if you let them, will mate with the females even though they’re sterile and don’t have sperm,” she says. “They transfer seminal fluids, which is part of the process of mating, and that induces some natural hormonal processes in the females after mating. So she thinks she’s mated and she stops mating for a period of time.” And because the male fly is sterile, the female’s eggs don’t grow into new flies.

Witherbee says the company has demonstrated this works in indoor trials, but without regulatory approval from the Environmental Protection Agency, it’s more challenging to run outdoor field tests. That’s because commercial growers would have to destroy the crops where the tests are run, because any fruit from those fields would not be able to be sold, he says. Few startups could afford to compensate a grower for that level of loss.

With H.A.R.V.E.S.T., Agragene will be able to get results from outdoor tests at field sites run by the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, where the fruit won’t be sold.

A view of sterile Drosophila suzukii males developed by St. Louis-based Agragene to control a common pest of fruit crops.

“It was a way to get experts that are out working in the field to test, on a whole field basis, our technology,” Witherbee says. “It’s an independent third-party doing the validation, which can’t be beat.”

Gamez adds it’s vital for the company to test its solution in the agricultural climates where it’s most likely to be applied.

“The market that this pest mainly targets is in California, Washington, [and] Oregon in the U.S.,” she says. “Being able to do a field trail in California means a lot, because regulators care about that. They want to see [if] you’ve tested this technology in the same geography where you intend to sell.”

This quality of the H.A.R.V.E.S.T. program makes it unique, says McLean, since the Midwest, North Carolina, and California all have different growing climates and conditions.

“You get access to different kinds of expertise, different agricultural environments and ecosystems,” she says. “I think that was novel and really strengthened the opportunity. It definitely came into play when we were considering those companies that would end up receiving the resources through the H.A.R.V.E.S.T. competition.”

Regagnon adds having technical partners where the growing conditions differ expanded the types of startups they could potentially welcome into the program. She says H.A.R.V.E.S.T. only considered companies referred to the Yield Lab Institute by its constellation of global partners. 

“We are thrilled with what we saw in terms of the level of engagement, the number of applications, the rigor with which the external advisory board took the selection process,” she says. “It was very difficult to whittle it down.”

That the majority of the first cohort is based in St. Louis simply speaks to the quality of the innovation bubbling up locally, she says.

“Those companies rose to the top of that selection process,” Regagnon says. “And it just goes to show you the level of excellence, not just in biologicals, but in agtech generally, that we have in St. Louis.”

Adds McLean: “When you look at the concentration of what we have here in St. Louis, it really is impressive.”

Regagnon says the seven selected companies will now dive right into their research projects, while H.A.R.V.E.S.T. prepares to open more applications for plant science based innovation later this year.

She says it has an eye toward expanding what future cohorts are organized around, potentially looking to help companies focused in the livestock space or on geospatial application in agriculture.

“We will be launching additional cohorts, not just plant science, in the not too distant future,” she says.