Back to his roots: How Nikolai Macnee is combining sustainable agriculture and deep technology to generate next generation biostimulants

Nikolai Macnee comes by his love for biology and food production quite naturally: “I grew up on Aotea (Great Barrier Island), surrounded by nature, with no mains power or water, so we were all living off the grid. This upbringing made me very conscious of resource consumption and gave me an intimate connection to the food I consumed and how it was generated,” he says.

He later moved to Australia and completed a Bachelor of Science degree in Melbourne. And, he continued to refine his plant molecular biology skills through an internship at the Max Planck Institute of Plant Molecular Physiology in Germany.

Weighing up PhD options, Nikolai eventually returned to New Zealand to co-found Helico Bio, a biotech company that made rapid developments generating pharmaceutical compounds such as insulin from plants.

Through all of his studies and entrepreneurial ventures, Nikolai became increasingly interested in the global food production system.

“I was surprised to learn that much of what I’d learned in biology had not been applied in commercial agriculture. There was sophisticated technical progress but less so innovation in terms of biology.”

Now, as the Founder, Director and Chief Scientific Officer of Metrovate, he’s on a mission to “make plants grow faster” by developing precision, novel biostimulants that are safe to apply to a wide variety of crops – moving away from potentially harmful herbicides and pesticides.

“The food and fibre sector needs to move away from conventional measures that require the use of small chemical molecules used in large quantities; we have a real opportunity to be a market leader in the use of sustainable techniques.”

Traditionally, though, the majority of biostimulants (typically derived from seaweed, algae, or bacteria) do not have a known method of action. This means that although they may increase growth outcomes, it’s unclear which ingredient is specifically causing the outcome. The testing is often crude, and the end product can include useless ingredients or ingredients that cause off target effects.

Metrovate aims to reverse this trend by studying the molecular structure and using a combination of computational data and AI to isolate bioactive molecules and predict their outcomes.

This is something Nikolai began working on as part of both the Blackbird and Sprout incubator programmes in 2022.

Here, he was able to talk to scientists, farmers, and industry leaders regarding the biology of the project and the commercial validation for biostimulant innovation.

“The total addressable market is expected to reach USD 9.40 billion by 2030, driven by an increase in the need for sustainable agriculture. And liquid biostimulants are predicted to dominate the market and conservatively could be considered 60% of the achievable market (5.64 Billion by 2030) – so we knew there was definitely a market opportunity here,” says Nikolai.

After refining his business proposition and producing an initial dataset, Nikolai needed to develop a minimum viable product, which AGMARDT is helping to fund.

AGMARDT funding also gave the boost Nikolai needed prior to his capital raise for the business. “Working with AGMARDT was an important way to demonstrate company traction and was a component of my value proposition that resulted in a pre-seed investment offer from Sprout.”

“It’s great to see AGMARDT funding supporting innovation in the sector, not only through our partnership with Sprout’s accelerator programme, but also through the follow-on funding Nikolai received with Metrovate, now a part of the Sprout investment portfolio,” says AGMARDT General Manager Lee-Ann Marsh.

Nikolai and team are set up at a R&D facility in Auckland, where they are continuing their novel approach – building on their deep computational analysis to create precision biostimulants and test these on staple crop plants.

Ultimately, they’re aiming to create a minimum viable product (MVP) in the form of computationally optimised bioactive ingredients with proven efficacy. Metrovate is rapidly developing its technology in preparation to engage with strategic partners around the world that can help them scale and deliver to growers everywhere.