IMIO banks $12m seed to turn corn stover into fertilizer savings

Residue-degrading biologicals maker IMIO has raised a $12 million seed round, lifting total funding to $16.5 million, with plans to expand production and build a biomanufacturing and R&D facility in Chicago.

Sofinnova Partners led the round. Backers include Chipotle's Cultivate Next venture fund, Starshot Capital, Grow Together Salinas, Earth Foundry and Serra Ventures.

The capital funds team growth, production capacity and the new Chicago facility. IMIO will also keep working with manufacturing partners on fermentation, including a South Dakota site equipped with lyophilizers.

What do the field numbers show?

University and farm trials covering more than 10,000 Midwest acres in 2024 and 2025 delivered an average corn yield increase of 11.9 bushels per acre. Responses ranged from 5 extra bushels to more than 20, depending on residue levels and existing crop management practices.

Founder and CEO Charles Smith frames the economics directly. An acre of corn stover holds roughly $134 worth of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, and residues from some specialty crops such as broccoli carry even higher nutrient value.

"Farmers have this nutrient reservoir that they will sometimes call trash, but that is ultimately something that can be a really valuable resource," Smith said.

IMIO orients its validation toward metrics that move farm margins. "So that's yield improvement, fertilizer savings, and potentially tillage savings," Smith said.

How does the product work?

IMIO's flagship products, Re-Gen for Row Crops and Re-Gen for Produce, apply highly concentrated, naturally occurring non-GM microbes directly to crop residues rather than trying to establish them in soil, where they would compete with existing microbial populations. Re-Gen is typically applied in spring around planting, timing nutrient release to the next crop's uptake window.

The company grows microbial strains individually, freeze-dries them, and blends them into a powder with a shelf life of more than 12 months that growers mix with water at application. Smith argues lyophilization preserves microbial viability where conventional heat-based spray-drying kills or damages organisms — a critical point for IMIO's lignin-degrading fungi, which would not survive heat drying.

The approach targets a shifting agronomic baseline. Modern corn varieties carry higher lignin content, and conventional practices can reduce populations of naturally occurring residue-degrading fungi in soils, Smith claimed.

What traction does the company have?

Founded in 2019 in Vermont, IMIO has generated commercial revenue on a small scale for two years and now counts 100 customers. It initially sold direct to farmers and is now adding distributors.

One early customer, Kirk Stueve, farms and owns land leased to other growers across Minnesota and Wisconsin. After two years of use in a high-residue, four-year corn-on-corn rotation, his treated 140-acre field beat its historic yield record by 36 bushels per acre. Stueve cut his nitrogen bill by $45-50 per acre without sacrificing yield.

"A lot of biologicals have great marketing strategies and sales teams but struggle to deliver in reality," Stueve said. "From what we've seen so far, IMIO is an outlier."

Corn is the volume play, but IMIO is pushing into specialty crops — broccoli, Brussels sprouts and lettuce — where Chipotle has connected it with growers. Cover crops present another outlet given the organic material they add to soils.

Can IMIO fix biologicals' consistency problem?

Investors have historically been wary of biologicals that fail on cost, stability, scalability and repeat performance. Smith says the company's commercial traction and product consistency closed the round.

"What we hear from farmers and agronomists is that consistency has been the biggest challenge when it comes to wide scale adoption and trust in biologicals," Smith said. "People need conviction that the consistency of performance will be there and the ROI will be reliable."

The company's bet: freeze-dried, high-activity microbes applied straight to residue can deliver that reliability at a scale compost operations never could. IMIO will now test whether 100 customers and two seasons of trial data convert into distributor-scale adoption.