Why I’m Excited by Messium

We recently invested in Messium, a company that uses innovative technology to address a major challenge in agriculture: inefficient fertiliser application.

I had always assumed I wouldn’t be able to get an agri business through the IC at SuperSeed. There are so many opportunities to introduce technology to agriculture, but so few of them are software plays.

Enter Messium, stage left, pursued by a bear(ish investment committee). Cue: Agri’s great pitch. *Clears throat*

George and Vishal’s Marvellous Messium

Messium immediately struck us as an exciting opportunity. George Marangos-Gilks (CEO and co-founder) and Vishal Soomaney Vijaykumar (CTO and co-founder) presented a compelling case with an urgent ‘Why Now?’, and SuperSeed quickly bought into their vision of a world where fertiliser is applied in Goldilocks proportions.

We at SuperSeed love bets where an incredibly niche solution solves an incredibly large problem (spoiler alert: more on that next month). Messium’s initial product uses hyperspectral satellite imagery and machine learning algorithms to optimise the application of fertiliser to wheat plants. It’s an elegant, clear value proposition that addresses farmers’ critical need to reduce their cost base, wherever possible (and, in some cases, increase and improve yield). The subsequent product releases remain Top Secret, but v1.0 addresses the world’s 522m hectares of wheat, maize, and rice.

We also love brilliant founding teams. George and Vishal are Scary Smart, to borrow a phrase from another scary smart founder from the SuperSeed portfolio.

George, while studying at Cambridge, founded The Tab. He then founded another business, Magic Carpet AI, which he sold to Blockchain.com. In both of these businesses, George was the founding CEO, and led them from foundation to exit.
Vishal, after a series of senior roles in machine learning development and backend engineering, co-founded a multiple-award-winning business leveraging satellite imagery to detect susceptibilities in forests to the outbreak of fires. One of the awards it won was the UN and ESA World Challenge in 2018, which means Vishal is both a satellite geek par excellence and extremely well-connected in the space industry.

We invest in businesses driving resource efficiency. Few resources are in such an important, finite supply as food. Messium’s innovation is a perfect example of AI and disruptive next-generation technologies having an immediate, detectable impact on the Real Economy and the real world. But it clearly struck a particularly resonant, harmonious chord with me. A sort of Jacob Collier unresolved madness chord, where the starting point itself is interesting, but the opportunities it introduces are utterly, gamechangingly, irresistibly transformative.

Messium’s long-term product roadmap is one of the most exciting visions I’ve seen. For context: my investment team reviewed about 4,000 businesses last year, and about 2,250 the year before. Part of my excitement originates, as you’ll read below, from bias. Part of it is based on my experience of farming at its most unsophisticated and unrefined. And part of it is because George and Vishal know, but I mean really know, how to sell a dream.

So, below, I’ll set the scene a bit. Why do farmers have such a tough time? Why does that matter? What impact does it have on a wider context?

The Micro

Farmers face shrinking margins due to rising costs and falling crop prices. Over- and under-fertilisation are significant and costly issues affecting all farmers. The nitrogen fertiliser spend on the average high-grade, milling wheat farm accounts for 35% of the total cost base, and of this, up to 60% is wasted. There’s a slightly American feel to the notion that more fertiliser = more crop. In fact, in the context of applying fertiliser, greed is not good: around 65% of all fertiliser applied globally is excess, which runs off into rivers and surrounding environments, polluting them. The caveat, admittedly, is that on lower-grade wheat farms (where the product usually ends up in animal feed) the margins are even slimmer. Here, the perennial issue is under-fertilisation, to the tune of an average opportunity cost of $13k per annum (‘Messium’ have embraced the Latin bit; so shall I).

It’s a really tough business. Your operating profit margins are razor-thin, and there is very little you can do to improve them. The general approach to farming is to try to improve yield, both in quality and quantity. But as we know, if revenue goes up by £1, profit does not go up by £1. If, however, we reduce costs by £1, that goes straight to the bottom line.

The farmer is an artist and her land is her canvas. Given a constrained space, budget, and timeframe, what is the best she can do? There are some things she can know, and some things she cannot. But Messium’s thesis is that fertiliser application requirements fall into the bucket of “knowable unknowns”, tipping the odds meaningfully in the farmer’s favour. And it’s attacking the single biggest cost centre on the farm: the fertiliser budget.

As I’ve alluded to already, ‘fertiliser application for wheat’ is very much Messium’s Product 1. Products 2-n promise to deposit an especially overweight elephant on the scales of success, completely rigging the game to the farmer’s advantage, and if you ‘get’ agri, you ‘get’ that farmers winning is a very. good. thing.

The Macro

…isn’t great, either, frankly. Unless you’re Messium.

We’re reliant on other nations for fertiliser. UK soil quality has degraded woefully over the last 200 years. Specialists worry we have about 40 years of fertility left in our soil. Intensive farming’s damage to the soil means that we really need fertiliser to get good crops out of it. The UK produced about 40% of its domestic fertiliser requirement in 2022. The largest fertiliser manufacturer in the UK closed its main manufacturing plant in 2023. We have a finite (and dwindling) domestic supply of fertiliser, and we rely a lot on imported goods, which cost more, further squeezing the margins of farmers’ crops. Messium can help farmers to reduce their investment in (expensive) imported fertilisers, and fatten those margins again.

We’re expensive compares to Aussies, too. Australia, in particular, can produce crops much more cheaply than we can. There is more arable land and the farms are a bit bigger. The labour costs are also pretty competitive. Most of their crops go to China at the moment, but the next variant of geopolitical instability could see Australia’s attention turn to our sunny shores: if, for any reason, there is an excess supply from Down Under, there is a ripe opportunity for them to undercut our domestic production. The UK-Australia Free Trade Agreement has also removed most tariffs involved in selling crops to the UK. Our farming economics are so fragile at present that we are at significant risk of becoming Australia’s best mate. A truly chilling prospect. Maybe we should throw the next Ashes series to keep them sweet. (Nah, crack on Sir Ben).

Messium helps farmers use less fertiliser, which — at scale — could narrow the gap between our domestic consumption and production capabilities, reducing our reliance on imported goods, and ensuring a higher degree of national food security.

More macro, even, than the British Isles (can you imagine!?): according to the UN, globally, we need 60% more food by 2050. To feed a population of 9.7 billion people, there are only so many vectors available to change. We either need more farms, less waste in supply chains and at home, or more efficient farming.

More farms. Well, we could continue our unrelenting mission to create more arable land. But it is time- and resource-intensive (ignoring, as if we have the luxury, the more pressing matters of the destruction of biodiversity, the contribution to climate change, the displacement of local communities, and — the Fourth Horseman of the Agricultural Apocalypse — the degradation of the fertility and productivity of the soil). OK, so “just add farms” might not wash.

Less waste. There are some obvious opportunities for improvement in consumer behaviour and supply chains, given that 1/3 of all food produced globally is lost or wasted. Primarily, this occurs because of bad infrastructure and storage, and absent-minded consumerism. The former is unlikely to change, because it’s really expensive to change. Fin. On the latter, I have given up hope almost entirely (“that orange is too orange to be deemed an orange by Sainsbury’s (also orange)” / “I’ll buy 6 of those perfectly orange oranges and proceed to eat only 2 of them because my hue preference changed during the week”). Here, too, it would be naive to expect a revolution.

So, the best option is to do more with the same (or less). Every farmer lives in constant supervision of resource efficiency. More food production from the same total arable land plot means we must be much more efficient at farming. The accurate application of fertiliser is as urgent as it is important. Roll on Messium, to clean up the mess.

What we don’t have in the UK is the following:

• Lots of land;
• Lots of farmers (especially young ones);
• Very much sun, in our climate or our disposition.

What we DO have in the UK is the following:

• Sophistication, like. We rotate the heck out of them crops, we cover crop like nobody’s business, we integrate the living daylights out of that pest management.
• We adopt and adore innovative agritech. We really are at the forefront of implementing advanced technologies: our agricultural universities and research centres are the best in the world; DEFRA pumps cash into farming innovation; and we won the Best Agritech Ecosystem Award in 2023.

There are lots of exciting ways for agriculture to develop in the future. I particularly like autonomous tractors, for example, because they’re epic. But the Scary Smart stuff is closer to the ground, closer to the action. Amusingly enough, Messium reckons you have to be in space to see it properly. The opportunity is more infrastructural than it is visible.

By addressing some of the deep, systemic inefficiencies in agriculture, we can take a very active, bottom-up approach to replotting its future. The fundamental starting point is understanding. To borrow a phrase from the (tragically fictional) Stewart Pearson, “Knowledge Is Porridge”. If Messium gets this right, it will own the largest, deepest, and most valuable agricultural data set in human history. That doesn’t just excite me; it actually kind of intimidates me.

I can’t wait to see where this journey takes us. George, Vishal, thanks for letting me muck in.