Yesterday Limagrain, the Fourth Largest Seed Company Worldwide, and StartLife entered into a partnership for a close collaboration in the next three years. The partnership is aimed at moving agriculture forward to meet the huge food challenges that our world faces. Limagrain will benefit from early access to innovative projects from qualified startups, dealing with all the value chain regarding agriculture, emerging technologies, new processes and new food products fitting with strategic needs.
Fulfilling global food needs
The partnership between Limagrain and StartLife will help face the challenge to feed close to 10 billion people by 2050. “In order to fill our global food needs we must increase our agricultural production by more than 70%, whilst taking climate changes into account and preserving our invaluable natural resources at the same time. This partnership will aid in developing and improving agriculture practices, for everybody and everywhere and in accelerating innovative and responsible agri-food solutions”, says Valérie Mazza, head of Scientific Affairs and Innovation of Limagrain.
Innovation and scouting partner
StartLife will be Limagrain’s innovation and scouting partner. We will support Limagrain to further expand their innovation ecosystem by acting as a connector and early startup innovation enabler with agri-entrepreneurs. Valérie Mazza: “We chose StartLife as our partner because they are the leading food and agritech startup accelerator in Europe and have a great track record as intermediary between corporates and startups.”
Opening doors for startups
Jan Meiling, managing director of StartLife, is also very excited to welcome Limagrain as new partner. “Entrepreneurs who enter into StartLife’s programs will immediately benefit from this partnership. It provides them with in-depth industry knowledge, capabilities to scaleup upstream technologies, access to other partners in the value chain, as well as valuable reality checks.”
About Limagrain
Limagrain is an agricultural cooperative owned by nearly 1,500 farmers located in Limagne Val d’Allier (in the center of France), and an international seed group with more than 10,000 employees in 56 countries. The Group breeds, produces and distributes field seeds, vegetable seeds and cereal products. Focused on the genetic progress of plants, it is driven by its purpose: cooperating for the progress of agriculture everywhere, for everyone.
As the fourth largest seed company worldwide, Limagrain, with well-known brands on their markets such as LG, Vilmorin, Hazera, Harris Moran, Jacquet and Brossard, makes 1,883 million euros in sales, to which is added 678 million euros made jointly with its strategic partners.