Company
A small agronomy company that happens to ferment things.
Colonize Bio was founded in 2022 in Minneapolis by two soil microbiologists and a former arable agronomist who had spent a decade watching biological products sold without measurement. The trial archive they started keeping is now the training set behind the AI platform.
Chapter 01
Contract trials first
A strain library and a strong opinion.
Chapter 02
Manufacturing in-house
Released against a CFU specification.
Chapter 03
Nine states
Growth limited by agronomy capacity.
How it started
The first two seasons were contract trial work for other manufacturers. That work produced a strain library and a strong opinion: most products failed because of application context, not because of the organism.
Manufacturing
Fermentation and formulation moved in-house in 2023 at a facility in Rosemount. Every batch is released against a CFU specification, and the certificate travels with the pallet.
Today
38 people, of whom 11 are field agronomists. Nine states in the register. We have turned down distribution offers in three more because we could not staff the assessment work behind them.
What we will not do
Three commitments that cost us revenue
No yield guarantees
The data does not support them and a guarantee priced into the product is just a more expensive product.
No selective trial reporting
Every trial entered into the programme database appears in the published distribution, including the 6% of sites that came in below the untreated strip.
No sale without an assessment
First-season customers get a field assessment before a quote. Roughly one in five is advised to spend the money on structure instead.