When Tricia Carey hinted last week that her next gig would be a bit of a twist, she wasn’t kidding.
The Lenzing veteran—you might also know her from her briefer time at the now-defunct Swedish textile recycler Renewcell—is taking up a new position as chief commercial officer at Avalo, a North Carolina-based “rapid evolution” startup that employs AI-powered genomic analysis to optimize certain traits in crops—drought resistance, say, or higher yields.
“I keep going backward in the supply chain,” Carey said. “From fiber to pulp to now this.”
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This isn’t genetic modification in the way the term is usually understood, said CEO Brendan Collins, a clinical neuroscientist who co-founded Avalo with computational evolutionary biologist Mariano Alvarez in 2020 after becoming “instant best friends” over several beers. While the machine learning part helps draft the ideal genetic blueprint for fast-to-market broccoli, heat-resilient tomatoes, lower-emissions sugarcane or low-input cotton, it’s really the swarms of bees the company dispatches that “go nuts” on the work of cross-pollinating parent plants, he said. Think, if you will, of something along the lines of 23andMe meets, well, Bumble.
“It was through industry introductions that we found each other,” Carey said when asked who slid into whom’s DMs. “I’ve been consulting for the past couple of months, so already have a sense of the direction of the company.”
Carey will be overseeing all of Avalo’s products, but her hiring comes as the company looks to scale up its two-year-old rainfed cotton program in the Texas panhandle—with a little assist from the $11 million Series A round it raised last month with Germin8 Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners and others. She sees her role as “kind of connecting everything that’s out there to see where we can actually bring these products into commercial reality.”
One of the things he and Alvarez bonded over, Collins said, was climate change, which he says is the biggest challenge this generation is going to face “by a long shot.” It’s why the duo homed in on agriculture. Crops like cotton, he said, provide the “biggest externalities” on the planet. Growing the fluffy stuff in northern Texas, for instance, has all but depleted the underground Ogallala aquifer that supplies water to multiple states. Though some 70 percent of the state’s cotton is now raised on dryland with limited irrigation availability, the prevailing genetics of the crop simply don’t work in that environment.
“It’s to the point that over the last three years, insurance payouts for cotton in Texas have been $3 billion every single year,” Collins said. “And so that means that a farmer plants their cotton seed, they apply nitrogen fertilizer, they apply herbicide, they apply pesticide, they incur all those input costs, but then they get about halfway through the season and realize their crop isn’t going to make and so they take the insurance check. And as you can imagine, that’s just wildly inefficient, and not great for the environment either.”
Collins and Alvarez realized that creating a more carbon-efficient cotton that requires fewer inputs, including 30 percent less fertilizer, could help big brands still struggling to cut their Scope 3 emissions. With more data gleaned from the right partners, Avalo could also breed cotton with fewer yield losses because of better interactions with microbes in the soil or a higher staple strength that would be more amenable to multiple life cycles.
The timing couldn’t be more apt with President Donald Trump’s levying of tariffs on countries such as Canada, China and Mexico. Canada is an important source of the plant nutrient potash, which is now being taxed at an additional 10 percent. The 47th administration’s 25 percent import tariff on steel and aluminum has also raised concerns about the increasing costs of farm equipment. Though Avalo is starting small with 20 farmers on roughly 2,000 acres that yield 100 tons of cotton per year in Texas, it plans to increase both its acreage and production by 10 times annually.
“We’re excited to have Tricia on board,” Collins said. “Congratulations to Avalo.”
