What is the difference between Food is Health vs. Food is Medicine? A lot. Food is Health is about avoiding medicine. It's about what we need from the food system to be healthy without seeing the doctor.
We think there's a huge amount of opportunity for them to use their growing global network in this growing digital verification set to drive livestock production to meet the needs of the future, where animal protein production will continue to be a part of the...
The world’s population is rapidly increasing, and many experts and analysts are pointing out that we may not be able to feed the world’s population in several decades. According to the U.N., the world’s population will reach
There’s been increasing conversation in the food world about non-animal-sourced meat products. People are beginning to use alternative proteins for various applications, from hamburger substitutes to high-class cuisine. But that’s not all that non-animal-based meat is capable of. There are still more brilliant...
Agricultural innovation plays a critical role in maintaining food security and improving the well-being of people across the globe. As the world population is expected to reach 9.8 billion by 2050, food needs will escalate further. However,...
As more and more efforts are directed towards challenging climate change worldwide, companies at home in the U.S. are doing their part to direct the power of entrepreneurial farmers towards the problem. Companies like Indigo Ag are investing millions of dollars to develop...
The trick with technology is less about technology and more about adoption. When I was a young engineer at McDonnell Douglas, we developed the first bunker buster bomb in 30 days, taking a cannon barrel, turning it down and building this new design...
Harnessing the Force of Creative Destruction: A Thesis in "Food is Health"
We believe in the power of innovation to make it better. Our investment focus is on the key lever points where a specific innovation drives consumer adoption, lowers cost, and drives...
I love rivers. I grew up in Louisiana on the Mississippi River. Our cotton fields bordered the levee. When I was working in those fields I would always eat my lunch on the levee so I could watch the massive river rolling by...
As the world strives for net-zero carbon emissions as a global society, the agriculture industry has been marked as a key sector for improvement. All of the decisions we make as a culture about our food choices and how we choose to grow...
When faced with the challenge of Y2K, the computer industry realized innovation is better. The turn of the millennium in 2000 was supposed to be an exciting event. Instead, for the IT and internet communities, it was a looming disaster. Thanks to a...
The IRS is about to hire as many as 87,000 new agents thanks to $80 billion in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act. It’s an attempt to correct years of underfunding at the agency. Maybe Innovation is Better.
On August 7, 2022 the United States Senate approved the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). It is anticipated to pass the House of Representatives and be signed into law in the near-term future.
The IRA allocates more than $369 billion for climate...
Today the world is facing the prospect of widespread food insecurity and starvation unlike any food crisis we have experienced in our lifetimes. According to the United Nations World Food program (WFP), “illions of people across the world are at risk of being driven...
“We are here to showcase a new wave of companies that are effectively applying technology to improve, disrupt, and transform agriculture, food and health for the better. We have no idea if a future Amazon is in our midst today, but looking back...
From fruits and vegetables, to tree nuts and flowers, specialty crops represent a unique class of crops that require extra care, investment and attention to be profitable and sustainable. That’s in part because the products produced by this segment of the agriculture industry...
Seemingly overnight, plant-based protein in everywhere. Impossible burgers are on the menu at restaurants across the country, Taco Bell is testing a taco made with synthetic chicken and plant-based milk producer Oatly just completed an IPO that valued the company at $13B.
The specialty crops industry makes up a significant proportion of U.S.’s total agricultural output by value. However, producing specialty crops has its own set of unique challenges that call for similarly unique solutions. This panel focused on the specialty crop industry’s challenges, dynamics,...
“Food is Health” has driven the iSelect investment process since our start in 2014. Americans spend more than $1.7T yearly on food and almost $1.9T on diet-related illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, obesity and type 2 diabetes.1
We’re Focused on Companies Solving This Problem...
Healthy soil is literally the foundation for a healthy food system and is a leading indicator for many key metrics around sustainability and ecological health. As a result, soil health is inextricably linked to plant, animal, human and global health.
Almost three years ago, iSelect strategically refocused its investment thesis on identifying the synergies between food and healthcare. At the time, food and healthcare were two completely independent, siloed verticals. But, the fact is, the more that we understand about disease and the better...
As a company dedicated to regenerative agroforestry solutions, Propagate Ventures works with farmers and land managers to design and install tree-crop systems that work in tandem with existing farm operations. Its fruit, nut, and timber tree systems complement...
We're here to talk about food system innovation. When we first started this conference, we talked about agtech, and as investors we also focus on healthcare and the convergence of healthcare and agriculture. Innovation is now being discussed as food system innovation. And, so we've...
Innovation is what drives prices down. That's why we have TVs and computers that are both incredibly powerful and affordable, and why we have healthcare that is incredibly unaffordable.
If food prices had risen at the same rate over the last 20 years that...
iSelect hosts a Deep Dive webinar on a novel innovation topic on the first and third Wednesdays of each month at 9 a.m. central. Our most recent session focused on bioavailability. By improving the bioavailability of the food we eat and our bodies'...
What if the waste products we throw away every day could do more for us? What if it were possible to take organic waste, such as food scraps, and recycle it into fuel and fertilizer? We recently sat down...
When it comes to sustainability in agriculture, there’s more to chicken waste than you might think. We recently sat down with Michael Lynch, CEO of Chonex, a nutrient recycling company focused on poultry manure, to talk about the technology his company is developing and how...
With 2021 well underway and with public markets still strong, we think it is an important time to highlight some of the key private market, venture investment themes that iSelect fund has identified for the year. We believe technologies transforming the Agriculture, Food and Wellness markets will flourish, with a focus on four areas: technologies that enable better food choices to drive better health outcomes, technologies that drive better, more profitable farm operations, technologies that drive the Consumerization of Healthcare, and biome-based treatment technologies. At iSelect, we invest for impact AND performance. We offer qualified investors access to emerging growth companies through our national venture capital strategy. Our unique structure allows our investors to continue to invest in these companies as they develop.
Why is now the right time for venture? The answer is that now is not explicitly the right time. Venture is something we need in our economy at all times. Now is not better than any other particular time. The question is, why ever stop? When we look at the challenges we’re facing in food and healthcare the reality is there is someone, somewhere who has an insight about how to build a product that will solve those problems. And if they put the right resources to it, they will succeed. As long as we need new technology to make life better or make our lives more enjoyable, we need venture capital to help fuel those entrepreneurs.
iSelect is a very unique product, but when you break it into its parts it’s fairly easy to understand. On the front end we’re a traditional venture capital fund. We have a diligence process. We have an investment process. We have categories of industries where we have focus and real expertise, and we invest in companies in those areas that meet requirements for the fund. On the back end we’re unique in that we don’t raise a large amount of capital at one time and deploy it over the life of our fund. Each deal that we bring onto the fund, our investors have to prove and determine to invest in that deal. We have to constantly prove our diligence standards. It’s accessible, transparent and easy for investors to come in and see our comprehensive process.
We are looking for founders that are passionate and we want the problem they’re trying to solve to be big, real, and painful. We want the solution to be revolutionary and we want our capital to be able to help them solve that problem. We want to know that they have customers involved and that the solution they’ve come up with actually meets those customers’ and market needs. And we want the team to be capital efficient with the money they’re spending.
We’re looking for a company that has an opportunity to have a 10x return to our investment or greater in a period of three to seven years. What excites us at iSelect are companies that are solving big problems. We want companies that are going to be the Monsantos of the future. Not just in the size and the scope, but the impact they have on people’s lives. We want to create positive impacts on people’s lives, so we invest in areas like agricultural production and areas like producing healthy foods for our kids. They are problems that impact real people’s lives on a daily basis. That’s what we’re trying to do at iSelect. We’re trying to solve the big problems out there. Find ways to bring capital to the entrepreneurs who are the real heroes out there getting up every morning, beating away at these things that are problems that you and me and everyone else faces in their everyday lives.
iSelect is a venture capital firm. What that means is we look at hundreds and hundreds of different companies and we apply tough diligence standards to each of them, looking at whether the team has a good plan for growing the business, whether the team is qualified and credible, and more. We do that to resolve the few who provide the best opportunities for investors. And then iSelect takes that smaller set of investments and goes to investors who are interested in venture capital and provides a way for them to invest in these companies, either individually or all at once. We co-invest alongside other venture capitalists. We source transactions through to an exit where the company would become public or get bought. And we manage that whole investment process on behalf of our investors.
