Fyto
Fyto is unlocking sustainable agriculture with aquatic plants.
Summary
Fyto is unlocking sustainable agriculture with aquatic plants. Through their automated and distributed technology platform, Fyto produces premium, affordable, nutrient-dense crops with radically lower carbon emissions. The company serves multiple markets, including feed, food, and biofertilizer.
Why We Invested
- Strong team out of MIT and a CEO with a unique combination of mechanical engineering and years of experience growing these plants.
- Soy is an enormous market, the largest source of plant proteins in the world, aquatic plants grow much faster than soy, resulting in dramatically higher yields per acre.
- Product can be sold at competitive or lower cost than soy with high margins. There is an opportunity to reduce capex with economies of scale.
- Good valuation and relatively low capital requirements to prove the model.
- Great sustainability story around the production of aquatic plants - less water, less energy and carbon negative.
Contact Fyto
Team
Jason Prapas
CEO/Cofounder
Jason is the Founder and CEO of Fyto. Prior to Fyto, Jason was the Director of Translational Research at the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design. There, he led the Tata Center’s efforts to select, shape, and position projects for large scale deployment, and helped develop 8 spinout companies formed in 18-months with over $8m in outside funding. He also was an instructor of technology, design, and entrepreneurship courses at Sloan School of Management. Prior to his role at MIT, Jason was the CTO and Co-Founder of Factor[e] Ventures, a venture development and investment firm that raised $6m. Jason led technology strategy, techno-economic analyses, technology de-risking and pipeline for the global economy (US, Kenya, and India offices). Previously, Jason was a Research Scientist and Director of Tech-to-Market Program at The Energy Institute at Colorado State University, where he served as the commercialization resource for 160+ faculty. Jason earned a BS in Physics with Honors from Brandeis University, a MS in Mechanical Engineering from Tufts University, and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Colorado State University.
Valerie Peng
Mechanical Engineer
Valerie is a mechanical engineer at Fyto. Prior to joining Fyto, Valerie was a Technical Intern at Intel, where she developed a solution for a metrology tool issue by performing lab testing for sensor characterization, rewriting the processing algorithms, and working with suppliers for high volume manufacturing deployment. Prior to her internship at Intel, Valerie was a research collaborator at Little Leaf Farms, where she designed a solution to improve the accuracy and precision of the automated seeding machines in Little Leaf’s automated lettuce greenhouse. Valerie has also been involved in research at the MIT Global Engineering and Research Lab, MIT Mechatronics Research Lab, and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology in the Low-Energy Electronics Lab. Valerie earned a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from MIT.