It’s Tuesday, and today we’re talking about an agritech company from Thailand called Living Roots. Founded in 2023 by Avika Narula and Abhi Agarwal, the company recently completed a $200,000 bridge round led by Epic Angels.
The Context
To grow anything at scale you need to (1) secure the right inputs, (2) apply them well, and (3) manage fields after harvest. Thailand has stress in all three areas.
Reliance on Fertilizer Imports
Thailand imports the vast majority of fertilizers. In 2024, their imports exceeded $2.5 billion, which is ten times higher than exports. It’s quite easy to see why that is a problem: in 2022, while the country’s fertilizer imports fell, prices per tonne grew by 45% because of globally inflated prices and the baht losing its value against the dollar.
The consequences are both severe and far-reaching. One problem is that the government must subsidize fertilizer purchases: rice farmers alone received almost a billion dollars in fertilizer subsidies during the 2024/2025 season, equal to 0.8% of the government’s budget.
Another issue is Thailand’s complete dependence on imports for things like potash. Every tonne is imported, so any disruption in supply would leave the country without potash almost immediately.
This dependence directly squeezes farmers’ margins. Distributors pass added import costs on to farmers, who are left to absorb them. Subsidies can provide short-term relief, but it’s hard to see them as a reliable or consistent tool for managing farmers’ businesses. In one instance, higher fertilizer prices led to lower fertilizer use, which in turn led to lower yields. Lower yields mean less food, and who wants less food?
Fertilizer Overuse
There’s a striking mismatch between growth in fertilizer use and growth in yields. In the 1960s and 1970s, cereal yields averaged 1.6-1.7 tonnes per hectare. Today they have risen to just over 3 tonnes per hectare. To achieve that modest improvement, fertilizer use skyrocketed from 1.7 kilograms per hectare to more than 100 kilograms. Roughly speaking, every 1% increase in yields has required a 68% increase in fertilizer use.
As you’d expect, this massive fertilizer injection has damaged soil chemistry. One study found that more than 40 years of nitrogen fertilization increased soil acidity and reduced calcium and magnesium levels — in other words, poorer soil biology and nutrient balance.
The problems extend beyond the soil. A well-documented effect is water contamination. Nutrients from sewage and farms fuel algal blooms, which shift seawater chemistry, reduce biodiversity, and degrade ecosystems.
Finally, about 1% of nitrogen applied to soils is converted into nitrous oxide gas, released into the atmosphere, and aggravating the greenhouse effect.
Field Burning
Field burning has been a customary agricultural practice since the Agricultural Revolution. Considering that ~12,000 years have passed since, you might assume that that’s not the optimal way to do things.
And you’ll be correct in that assumption.
For Thai farmers, as is the case with farmers in other developing nations, field burning is an easy, quick and cheap way to clear agricultural waste like rice straw and cane leaves.
About 30% of residue from both rice and sugarcane harvests is burned. In absolute numbers that means that between 9-12 million tonnes of residue is burnt every year of just rice and sugarcane combined. Field burning conducted in a single day.
The burning creates two major problems:
Air pollution. Take Chiang Mai as an illustrative case. Agriculture accounts for 16% of the province’s GDP, with rice and maize among the main crops. Field burning here contributes to 51% of PM2.51 during the smoke-haze season. To put that into perspective: outside of smoke-haze periods, 76% of emissions come from traffic — which is also the primary contributor to PM2.5 globally. By my estimates, field burning contributes to between 2,000 and 8,000 deaths and $2-8 billion in lost economic output every year2.
Soil degradation. Field studies in Thailand show that burning reduces microbial diversity and beneficial microbes. With rice straw, for example, burning can raise soil temperatures to 50-70°C, causing a 77% decrease in heterotrophic microorganisms. Populations of bacteria living in the topsoil drop by about 50%. Burning also accelerates soil erosion, while leaving residue in place helps reduce it.
Taken together, there surely gotta be a better way.
The Product
And there is.Bio-fertilizers as a category are not new, and plenty of companies already operate in the space. But Living Roots stands out, and in some ways in reminds of Puna Bio.
So let’s dig into what makes Living Roots unique.
The first thing to note is that the company began (and still runs) as a farm. The founders, Avika Narula and Abhi Agarwal, had no prior farming experience when they were “given an opportunity to develop a piece of permaculture property in Chiang.” While running the farm, they learned about regenerative agriculture, soil biology, and the damage caused by traditional farming practices. When they couldn’t find replacements for synthetic fertilizers, they started developing their own products and techniques.
That’s the first unique feature: using their own farm as a testing ground for product development.
Now, onto the products.
The company offers three solutions:
Seed-starting product. Living Roots has developed a seed coating that surrounds seeds with a cocoon of healthy microbes and nutrients before they even enter the soil. The idea is simple: if a seed begins life in conditions resembling fertile, balanced soil, it expresses more of its natural yield potential. If instead it encounters stress and imbalance, its potential decreases. This product mimics healthy soil, giving seeds the chance to thrive even in degraded fields.
Bio-nutrient fertilizers. This is the company’s core line — crop-specific biological fertilizers that serve as alternatives to synthetic inputs. These are designed to align with the critical growth stages of different plants, from rice paddies to tree crops.
Activate residue-management solution. To combat field burning, Living Roots developed biological agents that accelerate the breakdown of crop residues like rice straw or sugarcane leaves. Instead of turning residues into smoke, the solution recycles them into nutrients for the soil. That benefits both the environment and farmers by reducing fertilizer costs.
These products are proprietary, but the most interesting part isn’t the outputs (what they sell), it’s the inputs (how they’re developed). Both Avika and Abhi have a background in computer science, which it looks like they put to good use.
Both Avika and Abhi come from computer science backgrounds, and they’ve put that training to work. They built an AI system called Hypha to design all of Living Roots’ solutions. Hypha takes in data on crops, soils (including micronutrient deficiencies or biological imbalances), climate, and farming practices. It also uses published research, YouTube transcripts, and the company’s own data, such as leaf analyses. On one side you have information about the conditions; on the other, a library of possible solutions.
Hypha blends these inputs and generates custom fertilizer recipes tailored to specific crops and specific regions.
And crucially, Hypha doesn’t just generate one formulation that then gets commercialized. No. For example, the company is currently testing ten different rice nutrient formulations, each exploring a different path to yield improvement.
That’s the second unique feature: using AI to generate targeted, crop- and land-specific solutions for farmers.
And Living Roots doesn’t plan to stop there. The company intends to expand Hypha into an AI Agronomist. The system would go beyond designing products to diagnosing field issues, solving problems, and recommending localized best practices.
Whether that vision holds up remains to be seen. But according to the company, early Hypha users have already achieved 30-40% higher profitability while cutting fertilizer use by 40-50%.
The Business Model
In my view, three core ideas define Living Roots:
A deep focus on products farmers actually need. The company is tightly embedded in farmers’ workflows. It understands them, and designs solutions that don’t disrupt established practices. Two examples show this. According to the founders, they developed 20 products that were later scrapped because they required new machinery or additional steps. By contrast, the products they launched fit seamlessly into what farmers already do. The seed-starting product, for instance, is simply mixed with seeds, no extra process required. The fertilizers come in both liquid and granular forms — formats farmers are already used to.
The ability to create personalized solutions at speed. This strength comes from Hypha. With Hypha, personalization is theoretically limitless: if you have data on rice farming in a specific region of Thailand — climate, soil biochemistry, and so on — the algorithm can design a fertilizer tailored to that crop in that place. Hypha also transforms the pace of product development. By running a continuous cycle of formulation → creation → testing → feedback → protocol adjustment, Living Roots can both iterate faster and push toward true one-to-one fertilizer offerings.
R&D as the core business. The company has deliberately chosen to outsource manufacturing to partners that already invested the CapEx in facilities. This approach has two advantages. First, it avoids the heavy fixed costs of operating production plants. Second, local manufacturing partners can leverage local microbe strains, further differentiating Living Roots’ products. On the sales side, the company works through distributors with farmer relationships. The net effect: Living Roots concentrates its energy on what matters most — product development.
These choices echo a principle I’ve mentioned before in this blog: Jeff Bezos’s idea of focusing only on what makes your beer taste better.
Monetization
Living Roots sells its solutions through distributors who already have farmer connections. Farmers spend about $160 per acre per season on its products, roughly in line with what they would pay for traditional fertilizers.
The Bear Case
To be honest, aside from the possibility that Living Roots’ solutions don’t work as well as advertised, I don’t see much of a bear case. What I do see are barriers to overcome, and I think there are two.
The first is manufacturing quality control. What happens if a batch is contaminated, the quality varies, or the shelf life turns out to be weaker than expected? This risk becomes more acute when scaling abroad, where the company’s control over production is weaker, and its understanding of local supply chains and market dynamics is limited.
The second is distribution. Building relationships with trusted distributors who can support long-term profitability will take time. And, again, the challenge grows in foreign markets.
The Bull Case
The upside is straightforward: the products are better across every dimension, and the company can scale them. Farmers earn more from their land, reduce spending, and improve soil health, which means long-term profits.
On top of that, Hypha’s personalized recommendations could become a powerful margin-expansion tool. Fertilizer sales are not a high-margin business. Software very much is.
The Takeaway
I’m bullish on basically every agritech startup I write about. I’m not sure whether that’s because I lack deep expertise (I’m no biologist) or because this is simply a sector where, if you do manage to get it right, the upside is enormous.
I lean toward the latter. If you discover something that works, demonstrate that it works, and scale it beyond the testing stage, there isn’t much that can hold you back.
1: PM2.5 refers to tiny particles of air pollution — smoke, soot, and dust — smaller than 2.5 micrometers (about 1/30 the width of a human hair). They’re so small that they can penetrate deep into the lungs and even enter the bloodstream.
2: On the lower end, all fires in Southeast Asia contribute to 12% of PM2.5-related deaths. Considering that field burning accounts for about half of that, and that in Thailand overall PM2.5 causes 32,000 premature deaths and ~$33 billion in lost economic output, we arrive at the lower estimate (i.e., 12% × 0.5% = 6% of losses, both in human lives and GDP). On the high end, there is no national data, but several provinces report contributions from field burning of 20-30%. Let’s assume the real figure lies somewhere in between; that would mean about 25% of losses are attributable to field burning.
