Upstream Ag Professional - April 27th 2025

Welcome to the 90th Edition of Upstream Ag Professional

Index:

1. ICL Acquires Lavie Bio and Assets for $18.25 Million: Insights and Analysis into Financials

2. Q1 2025 Earnings Results Highlights and Analysis: Bayer AGM, Yara and Valmont

3. Most ag retailers and cooperatives are playing to play

4. MCP in Ag LLMs: What Agribusiness Professional Need to Know

5. DPH Biologicals® Study Announces Clear Modes of Action for TerraTrove® AmplAphex

6. Corteva Catalyst Invests in Puna Bio

7. Agtech VC: Bear Case, Bull Case, and what comes next

8. BioLumic Oversubscribed Funding Round Accelerates a New Category of Non-GMO Seed Traits

9. When answers get cheap, good questions are the new scarcity

10. Other Interesting Ag Articles (7 this week)

This week’s audio edition can be found here and includes the following topics:

1. A look at the Lavie Bio Acquisition by ICL (00:40)

2. Overview of the Bayer AGM, including highlights on glyphosate and DSO (19:00)

3. Ag Retail Differentiation (31:45)

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1. ICL Acquires Lavie Bio and Assets for $18.75 Million: Insights and Analysis from Financials - Upstream Ag Professional

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

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:

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