Sometimes, answering a long-standing problem is a matter of finding a new perspective.
Take methane from cows: For years, people have been trying to eliminate the gas from cow burps in an attempt to limit the livestock’s impact on the climate. But they haven’t made a dent. That’s in part because they were looking at the issue from the perspective of a climate scientist, not a farmer.
Kathryn Polkoff, co-founder and CEO of Hoofprint Biome, has been thinking about the problem more like a farmer, though.
“The first time I heard about this methane problem was animal science 101,” Polkoff, who has a PhD in animal science, told TechCrunch. It wasn’t in the context of climate change, but of animal health and productivity.
Polkoff and her co-founder Scott Collins have stumbled upon a novel way to modify a cow’s microbiome using enzymes, slashing methane while boosting the nutrients available to the cow.
That discovery has netted Hoofprint a $15 million Series A round led by SOSV, the startup exclusively told TechCrunch. Other participating investors include AgriZeroNZ, Alexandria Venture Investments, Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Breakthrough Energy Fellows, Good Growth Capital, Ponderosa Ventures, and Twynam. The new round will help the company trial its enzymes on farms.
“We’ve spent thousands of years breeding the animals to make them as efficient as possible and to increase the yield, and but there have not really been that many attempts to change a microbiome,” she said. “That’d be like if you were engineering a car but had never changed the engine — that’s where all the energy comes from.”
Hoofprint’s feed additive tweaks the microbiome in a cow’s rumen and suppresses the growth of microbes that generate methane, a potent greenhouse gas that warms the planet 84 times more than the same amount of carbon dioxide.
Rumen is a “hodgepodge assembly line,” said Po Bronson, the SOSV general partner who led the firm’s investment in Hoofprint. The stuff cows eat tends to be very hard to digest and extract nutrients from. Over the millennia, cows have evolved alongside a complex microbiome in the rumen that helps break down the forage, releasing nutrients in the process.
The cow absorbs some of those nutrients, but not all. Another group of microbes steals some of those nutrients to drive their own growth at the expense of the cow’s, generating methane as a byproduct. “It’s a very specific subset of microbes that are making the methane,” Polkoff said.
Hoofprint’s enzyme suppresses those microbes. The startup will use yeast to make the enzymes, similar to how other industrial enzymes are made, including those used in cheese, detergent, and other products.
For Bronson at SOSV, the fact that Hoofprint’s enzymes are derived from the rumen itself was key. One previous methane-reducing product, Bovaer, faced a wave of disinformation when a large food company announced trials in the UK in December.
He doesn’t think that Hoofprint will face the same backlash. “The core concept is that their product is a natural protein. They degrade just like any other protein an animal would eat. They’re sort of natural to the rumen.”
Hoofprint is targeting a 5% improvement in “feed efficiency,” Polkoff said, or how many more pounds a cow can put on for a given amount of feed.
By improving the efficiency of a cow’s rumen, Bronson is confident Hoofprint will be able to succeed with farmers where other startups have failed. “Knocking down methane is table stakes,” he said. “To make it a more productive thing is what they will pay for.”
