ICL Acquires Lavie Bio and Assets for $18.75 Million: Insights and Analysis from Financials

Index

1. Overview

2. Deal Dynamics

   a. Price

   b. Corteva

3. ICL Involvement

4. Is it a good deal for ICL?

5. Final Thoughts

 ICL Acquires Lavie Bio and Assets for $18.75 Million - SEC

Overview

Key Takeaways

• Lavie Bio assets have been acquired by ICL Group for an aggregate $15.25 million. ICL also acquired the AI discovery engine for an additional $3.5 million. ICL had invested in a $10 million SAFE in 2022. Corteva was an investor, owning 28% of Lavie Bio.

• ICL has been augmenting its Growing Solutions segment with multiple acquisitions over the last few years. The Lavie Bio acquisition gives them access to a discovery capability and a pipeline of new products.

Evogene is a public entity, founded in 1999 as a division of Compugen and then spun off publicly in 2002. Given that Evogene is public, there are more details around the financials of the transaction.

Evogene had five (now four) subsidiaries and three (now two) artificial intelligence engines driven by what they call a “computational predictive biology” platform, or CPB Platform.

The CPB platform is used for product discovery and development, utilizing comprehensive computational biology to find suitable molecules while reducing the time and cost of product development.

Lavie Bio focuses on developing ag-biological products. It uses the MicroBoost AI tech engine for its developments, which was acquired, too. According to their 2025 company overview, Lavie Bio had 17 employees.

Lavie Bio previously had partnerships with Corteva and Syngenta.

Deal Dynamics and Financials

The announcements have framed this sale as a positive for Evogene— but the financials suggest otherwise. ICL acquired Lavie Bio of $15.25 million plus an additional $3.5 million for the MicroBoost AI engine for a total price tag of $18.75 million.

Evogene and Lavie Bio were not on solid footing. Evogene needs to focus its portfolio, and Lavie Bio and the MicroBoost engine did not seem to meet the criteria.

In 2024, Evogene had just $8.5 million in revenue, with almost 70% of that coming from “agriculture,'“ which includes Lavie Bio and AgPlenus:

Of the $5.9 million, $2.5 million came from Corteva in Q1 2024 as part of a $5 million agreement from 2023. But, Corteva and Lavie Bio ended their agreement in November of 2024, signalling no future revenue from Corteva:

Corteva owned ~28% of Lavie Bio after a $10 million investment in 2019 (plus Taxon Biosciences assets, valued at $17 million for a total of $27 million invested according to public documents), suggesting the post money value of Lavie Bio to be $>95 million.

That means over the last 6 years, the value of Lavie Bio declined by over 80%.

It also indicates Evogene received around $10.5 million (~70% of $15.25 million) + $3.5 million (for the AI engine) as proceeds of the transaction.

Corteva turned $10 million, owned biological assets and $5 million in payments for the initial licensing agreement into about $4 million (28% of $15.25 million) and no commercially ready biofungicide product.

ICL Involvement

In 2022, ICL and Lavie Bio entered a multi-year collaboration agreement for developing novel biostimulant products focused on fertilizer efficiency. As part of the collaboration, ICL Planet Startup Hub invested in Lavie Bio.

Via ICL Planet Startup Hub they invested $10 million in Lavie through a SAFE agreement (simple agreement for future equity).

The SAFE signals they didn’t receive equity immediately and that ICL would get shares under certain conditions, which were stated in public Evogene materials as the following:

• If Lavie Bio raised more money from other investors, ICL would get shares at a 20% discount compared to those new investors.

• If Lavie Bio sold or went public, ICL would get a share of that outcome based on how big the investment is.

ICL would have the option to invest more money later, and if they did, they could own up to 14.29% of the entire company. If Lavie Bio didn’t raise more money within 30 months, ICL would still get shares — but they’d be priced assuming the company is worth $70 million.

The investment announcement was August 2022, ~32 months ago. The valuation ICL paid for Lavie was about 20% of the potential $70 million valuation.

The price ICL purchased Lavie Bio for suggests the Lavie Bio results underwhelmed in the ~2.5 years since the SAFE agreement and there were little prospects for future success within Evogene. The sale of Lavie Bio, the price, plus the AI engine, suggests Evogene is not seeing anywhere near the demand they were expecting and indicates the upside for the AI engine is embedded directly in a business with a route to market.

It also reinforces future efforts for Evogene. Based on a recent interview the CEO of Evogene did, he stated they are more interested in the pharmaceutical space. Essentially, they are selling a lower potential business segment giving them more resources to focus on a seemingly higher potential segment (even though that business segment is growing slower than all other segments according to their financials).

Is it a good deal for ICL?

ICL has been working to augment the high margin products within its Growing Solutions segment:

ICL has made several biostimulant and specialty fertilizer related acquisitions over the last 5 years, including:

• Nitro 1000 — a Brazilian biostimulant company

• Custom Ag Formulators — a North American company focused on liquid and dry specialty products

• Fertiláqua — a Brazilian specialty plant nutrition business

They have acquired for market entry and manufacturing in the specialty fertilizer and biological segment, specifically in North America and Brazil. Now, they have acquired a small portfolio and the ability to internally develop new products.

ICL has seemingly not had a deep pipeline of products or team focused on internal development of biostimulant products. In 2024, they spent just $69 million in R&D, a subtle decline from 2023 investment of $71 million. Not a lot when it comes to building a global pipeline of value added fertilizer products.

The Lavie Bio acquisition gives them an additional pipeline of proprietary products coming to market:

Along with a discovery engine and a library of 150,000+ microbial strains that can be zero’d in on for ICLs specific desires.

I suspect ICL will try to sell the biopesticide assets.

According to a Lavie Bio release last summer, in its collaboration with ICL they identified over a dozen novel microbes within 12 months.

Final Thoughts

I previously wrote about how Evogene was taking a similar approach to Nimbus Therapeutics for agriculture.

Nimbus uses an asset-centric, LLC-based model where each discovery program is housed in a standalone subsidiary (like AgPlenus, Lavie Bio etc). Deals with external partners involve equity or equity-like investments directly into these subsidiaries, along with an option for the partner to acquire the subsidiary at a defined milestone under pre-negotiated terms.

This structure enables project-specific funding without diluting the parent company, provides clear paths to liquidity for shareholders, and offers partners a balance sheet-friendly way to access innovative assets. It also gives Nimbus financing flexibility, allowing individual programs to be extended or funded independently without affecting the broader platform.

The sale of Lavie Bio for less than the total capital it raised, along with the discovery engine, suggests there was no short or medium term route to make this approach work in the ag biological segment. Given that biologicals have lower levels of differentiation and lower revenue potential than therapeutics suggest this area would be challenging.

The AgPlenus, the agchem discovery segment of Evogene, and Biomica, the therapeutics related segment of Evogene use the same ChemPass AI engine. AgPlenus still has agreements with Bayer and Corteva for herbicide discovery signed in 2024, so assuming they can manage costs it seems likely that AgPlenus is maintained within Evogene for now.