SoilSerdem, an Ames-based startup, won a $1 million National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research Phase II award through BioConnect Iowa’s America’s Seed Fund Outreach Program. According to a news release, America’s Seed Fund (powered by NSF) awards $200 million annually to startups and small businesses transforming scientific discovery into products and services with commercial and societal impact.
SoilSerdem’s leaders, founder and CEO Yones Khaledian and Daniel Linton, vice president and chief technology officer, are developing a soil-mapping technology that produces high-resolution maps based on the principles of soil science. This technology allows for more efficient and cost-effective soil management that will result in benefits like better land usage and crop production.
The end goal for Linton and Khaledian is to make informatics — collection, management and mapping — accessible to both agronomists and farmers, the release said. SoilSerdem focuses on large crop production (corn and soybeans) and is now expanding its scope into other cropping systems with the help of the NSF award, including potatoes, cotton and wheat. The startup has raised over $1.3 million in non-dilutive state and federal seed funding and has participated in several entrepreneurship programs, including ISU I-Corps, National I-Corps, ISU Startup Factory incubator (cohort nine), ISU Venture Mentoring Services, and the Iowa Go-To-Market accelerator.
