PES Technologies Secures £2.4M to power Product Launch in 2024

UK-based PES Technologies has closed its £2.4M Seed Investment round. This will enable PES to make their revolutionary in-field soil health measurement tool market-ready and power its launch in Spring 2024.

TSP Ventures

The funding round was led by TSP Ventures, with participation from Kero Development Partners, Green Angel Ventures, Moorhampton Investments Limited, Climate.vc and Generation-RE Holdings as well as angel investors and existing shareholders. The round is also supported by Innovate UK, which will add an additional £625k of non-dilutive funding on top of the raise.

Based in Norfolk, PES Technologies has developed a product that provides industry-leading, biology-based soil health information in-field in 5 minutes. The product is built around PES’ unique VOC-sensing (or “smell-based”) technology that, with one test, provides the multiple biological, chemical, and physical indicators agronomists use for soil health assessments.

Soil is a finite and non-renewable resource that should be teeming with life, especially microbial life –without it, soil is not soil, but just dust. Unfortunately, a significant amount of our world’s soils are degraded or heavily degraded , and the cost of land degradation has been estimated to be $231B per annum globally . Moreover, soil in poor health produces less food and is less resilient to climatic extremes, making it more prone to flooding and drought.

While governments, industry and farm businesses worldwide are increasingly looking to protect soils’ health, a lack of good-quality, affordable testing for soil biology has hampered their efforts and hindered the uptake of environmentally sustainable farming practices. PES solves this testing problem by using its unique technology to detect smells produced by microbial life in soil and link it to known soil health indicators with its affordable and easy-to-use product.

Founders

Founded in 2017 by CTO Jim Bailey, CEO Andrej Porovic and Graham Bailey (now retired), PES sees itself as “The Future of Soil Health Measurement”. It employs a team of 5 and is looking to strengthen with multiple hires over the coming months. It was recently featured on the Cleantech Group’s 2023 50 to Watch (selected from 1,814 companies) and was one of the FoodTech 500 in 2022.