Non-profit Triple Helix is on a mission to boost the adoption of innovative agtech by bringing together researchers, regulators, communicators, and industry players, and the organization’s investor council aims to tackle one of the largest issues facing the agtech sector — capital constraints.
Starting in June 2026, a council of agtech investors and thought leaders will meet to discuss ways to take agricultural technologies from the validation to the scaling phase, Sarah Garland, founder and executive director of Triple Helix, told AgNavigator. The council will share insights and develop a framework to more effectively allocate capital in agtech, the organization shared in a press release.
Founding members of the council include:
- Bonnie Brayton, senior venture associate, Fulcrum Global Capital;
- David Babson, executive VP, XPrize;
- Derek Norman, VP, Leaps by Bayer;
- Mark S. Brooks, independent agtech advisor;
- Mark Lewis, co-founder and managing partner at Trailhead Capital;
- Mathias Müller, senior director, Corteva Catalyst;
- Sara Balawajder, director of investments, Builders Vision; and
- Terence Tse, manager, Breakthrough Energy Discovery.
Through periodic meetings, the council will devise solutions to overcome agtech adoption hurdles, Garland explained. This could include providing agtech founders with insights on what investors look for in companies or sharing recommendations on how different stakeholders – investors, researchers, and regulators – can work together to boost agtech adoption, she added.
“There’s a lot of innovation in the pipeline at the discovery stage, but even if it is validated at pilot scale, it stalls before it is deployed at large scale, and that’s one thing that we’re definitely going to be addressing — taking a technology that’s been validated to be effective and actually getting it deployed at scale,” Garland elaborated.
‘We don’t have time to wait around for the next cycle’
This council comes as agtech continues to face funding challenges amid high-profile failures, and generalist investors are uneasy about entering the sector. Out of 1,197 backed agtech companies, 57.1% of companies failed, equating to $8.2 billion in destroyed capital, according to PitchBook data, ending Dec. 31, 2025.
Despite the funding slump, agtech innovation is needed to address some of the biggest challenges facing agriculture today, Garland noted.
“There are a lot of challenges facing the agtech space, but the issues that ag technologies are trying to address are very urgent, and so we don’t have time to wait around for the next cycle, when [agtech] becomes popular again. We really need to make sure that these innovations are getting the stable support to actually drive impact in the field for our growers and for consumers to have resilient and productive agriculture,” she emphasized.
