Singapore, 19 September 2023 — Singapore-based regenerative agriculture-focused climate tech firm RegenX has secured US$500,000 in Pre-seed funding from VC climate tech venture builder Wavemaker Impact.
Founded by serial entrepreneur Bao Nguyen, RegenX is currently the only climate tech company in Southeast Asia that is making regenerative agriculture more profitable than conventional agriculture.
Conventional agriculture diminishes soil health due to the intensive use of chemical fertilizers and monocultures. This leads to a continuous decrease in yield, and threatens food security and farmers’ livelihood. Regenerative farming, on the other hand, has often been identified as a key solution to climate adaptation and mitigation. Transitioning to regenerative farming, however, remains a daunting challenge for most smallholder farmers.
RegenX addresses this challenge by introducing the RegenX Flywheel.
In a market valued at over US$100 billion, the RegenX Flywheel empowers global buyers to procure toxic-free and traceable ingredients directly from regenerative farming regions. This unlocks higher farm-gate prices for farmers that RegenX supports through post-harvesting guidance and regenerative agriculture monitoring. In turn, better farming economics incentivizes regenerative practices, creating more supply for RegenX ingredients that buyers can secure, enabling a virtuous cycle .
This breakthrough approach sequesters more carbon, improves soil health, and fosters biodiversity and water conservation.
Using farming systems encompassing intercropping, agroforestry, and the elimination of harmful pesticides and herbicides, RegenX reduces farmers’ input costs and aims at sequestering 100 Megatons of CO2e annually–or ~8% of the 1.3 Gigatons of CO2eq emitted on Southeast Asian agricultural farm land.1
This could regenerate 6 million hectares of arable land in Southeast Asia while significantly improving farmers’ livelihoods and resilience to climate change.
“Building a successful climate tech startup in Asia typically requires a combination of online and offline–involving physical hardware with digitalisation–capability, coupled with deep passion for the space. Bao demonstrated all of this and had early customer traction even before we’d seen the pitch deck. We’re excited to lead the investment in RegenX,” said Steve Melhuish, Founding Partner at Wavemaker Impact.
Unlike most agritech companies operating midstream or downstream which optimize operations at the processing or consumer stages, RegenX intentionally chose to go upstream, directly at the farm-gate.
“The crux of having a sustainable agrifood production system is to make regenerative agriculture more profitable for farmers than conventional agriculture, and to do so in a commercially viable way. Though it may seem deceptively simple, executing has always been a huge challenge. But we are now proving that it can be done,” said Bao Nguyen, founder and CEO of RegenX.
RegenX also benefits from an inflationary environment, regulatory pressures to decarbonize as well as the increasing global investors’ interest in nature-positive solutions.
“Bao and RegenX have proven that it is possible to create real value for farmers and offtakers alike using nature-based solutions such as regenerative agriculture,” said Doug Parker, founding partner at Wavemaker Impact.
RegenX is already onboarding farmers and buyers on its platform and will use the fresh round of funding to accelerate its growth in the coffee space in Vietnam.
To learn more about RegenX transformative approach, please visit www.regenx.ag
[1] https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#home
MEDIA CONTACT:
Bao Nguyen
Founder and CEO
bao@regenx.ag
About RegenX
RegenX is a platform that makes it easy for food buyers to source Regen Ag ingredients directly from Regen Ag farmers. By increasing farmers’ net income and providing Regen Ag assistance and monitoring, RegenX creates a virtuous flywheel incentivizing the deployment of regenerative agriculture at scale.