Wild Genomics

University of California-San Diego, Rady School of Management

Industry: Biotech/AgTech

MBA Founding Student Name(s): Eirik Torheim

Brief Description of Solution: Biomonitoring based on the sampling and analysis of air. We are on a mission to help farmers detect this and other pests and weeds early and reliably, and at the same time reduce the need for pesticides and weed killers.

Funding Dollars: About $100,000

What led you to launch this venture? A passion for nature – our solution reduces the need for broad-acting pesticides and promotes biodiversity.

What has been your biggest accomplishment so far with venture? Building a strong team of more than 10 people who share the passion of my co-founder and myself, and who are willing to contribute for equity or just the learning experience.

What has been the most significant challenge you’ve faced in creating your company and how did you solve it? Establishing a team has been critical, since it takes people to build companies. Even without investor funding, we got the team that we needed. The solution was to involve legal expertise to build a sound and fair framework for attracting talent.

How has your MBA program helped you further this startup venture? They have helped in so many ways. Even though I have done multiple startups in the past, Rady equipped me with knowledge and insight that lets me act more confidently, and with more clarity than before. I also took Wild Genomics through Rady’s Lab to Market program, and it was great taking the first steps of the venture with help from my amazing classmates.

Which MBA class has been most valuable in building your startup and what was the biggest lesson you gained from it? Lab to Market. It allowed us time to refine our messaging and value proposition, including direct customer feedback, prototype building and field testing.

What professor made a significant contribution to your plans and why? Prof. Amy Nguyen-Chyung stood out as someone who had experience and perspective, and who helped us navigate the early beginnings of our startup. We were also inspired by winning the “Most Promising Venture” award in her Lab to Market class.

How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to your venture’s development and success? We have had tremendous support from the UC San Diego startup ecosystem and participated in many of the incubator and accelerator programs on campus. To this day, some of our biggest supporters are from UC San Diego. Notable examples include the Sullivan Center at Rady, which support us through their incubator; the UC San Diego Office for Innovation and Commercialization, from whom we obtained the CA CARES grant that really got our technology development on track; the StartR Accelerator Program, which took us through much of the foundational business development and gave us a chance to shine as the winner of their Demo Day; and The Basement, where we found our first “home” on campus and the support we needed to prototype our sampling device.

What is your long-term goal with your startup? To help bring about solutions that allow us to stop and reverse the ongoing loss of nature and biodiversity.

Looking back, what is the biggest lesson you wished you’d known before launching and scaling your venture? Our biggest challenge has been that neither of the founders has any experience working in agriculture. We have gradually built a network and first-hand experience from the field, though knowing exactly whom to reach out to at an earlier point would have been helpful.

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