Seedless Fruit, Better Pet Care And A Lot More

This is a monthly column that runs down five interesting deals every month that may have flown under the radar. Check out last month’s entry here.

It’s fall and there’s a lot going on — school’s in full swing, there’s a chill in the air, and you can buy pumpkin-spiced anything.

There were also a lot of interesting startups raising cash in September. If you missed some, we have a list right here.

Seedless blackberries

Nearly everyone likes some type of fruit — but let’s face it, they’d be better without seeds.

Enter Pairwise Plants, a gene-editing company trying to improve plant breeding in specialty and commodity crops. The Durham, North Carolina-based startup closed a $40 million Series C led by Deerfield Management this month, along with other investors such as Leaps by Bayer, as well as agriscience giant Corteva Agriscience.

The company will use the new cash infusion to scale Pairwise’s innovative product pipeline, including seedless berries and pitless cherries — such as its new seedless blackberry variety, announced in June.

However, it’s not just that Pairwise is developing seedless fruits. Its gene-editing technology is also allowing crops to be more resilient and adaptive — something needed as the effects of climate change take hold.

As part of the investment, Corteva and Pairwise have entered into a five-year joint venture collaboration focused on accelerating the pace of gene-editing technologies.

As the world changes, our food needs to follow suit.

Better diagnoses

When a biopsy is needed, one expects that diagnosis to be clear and on target.

However, the truth is a shortage of pathologists and 85% of pathology biopsies are still on glass slides — meaning the ability to share information and opinions is limited.

Image-sharing platform startup PathPresenter locked up $7.5 million led by Avant Bio to try to change that. The Montville, New Jersey-based company has developed an enterprise pathology workflow solution to digitize those slides and create the opportunity to democratize access to the world’s pathology knowledge. The platform also leverages new artificial intelligence algorithms and foundational models to enhance patient outcomes.

The platform already has a fast-growing digital pathology community with 50,000-plus users in 172 countries.

No one wants a cancer diagnosis, but it’s best if that diagnosis is right so the correct treatment plan can be created.

AI for pets

Pets have been in the news a lot — for a variety of reasons.

We’ve even recently written about pet startup funding being down.

Well, this month saw a pet-related startup receive funding, as Scribenote — an AI platform for veterinarians — locked up an $8.2 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Now, startups that help doctors take notes and eliminate the burden of spending hours writing medical records isn’t new for doctors who see people, but this is the first we’ve heard of one doing it for vets.

The Ontario-based startup is looking to ease the burnout crisis the veterinary profession faces. In fact, 86% of veterinarians report severe stress levels. One cause is the need to keep accurate and complete medical records despite some veterinarians seeing up to 30 patients in one day.

Everyone wants what is best for their pets — and that certainly includes vets who are not overworked and stressed out.

A chip and a cell

What do microchips and cells have in common? Perhaps not much, but one may be able to tell us more about the other.

At least that is what CytoTronics is trying to find out. The Boston-based startup, which just raised a $13.5 million Series Seed 2 led by Anzu Partners and Lyfe Capital, is creating a chip platform for discoveries in cell biology.

The company intends to use the fresh cash to accelerate its market entry for its semiconductor-to-live-cell interface for cell biology applications, Pixel. The platform allows for high-resolution, real-time assessment of live-cell characteristics — giving researchers a deeper and better understanding of how chemical or genetic deviations affect cell function.

Pixel allows researchers to leverage electrochemical and electrophysiological capabilities, giving them high-level data collection that could be used for drug development and other pharmaceutical needs.

Technological innovations have helped us better understand our bodies for centuries. Now chips are helping us understand the smallest part of them.

Reversible power plants

There are a lot of carbon-related startups out there, so it can be hard to separate yourself.

However, Reverion’s technology seems to do that — and the company raised a $62 million Series A led by Energy Impact Partners this month.

The Germany-based startup is looking to build reversible, carbon-negative power plants. The company’s fuel cell-based plants can double the electricity output of conventional gas engines while also operating reversibly to produce and hold renewable natural gas or green hydrogen in times of electricity surplus.

Lastly, Reverion’s plants also can capture the CO₂ created during power generation — making the process of power generation from biogas carbon-negative.

The company plans to use the new cash to begin production of its power plants and meet the more than $100 million in customer pre-orders it has received — a bad start.