26 October 2026, Illinois: A US agricultural biologicals company has raised $12 million to expand production of a product designed to break down crop residue left in fields and release the nutrients trapped inside it, rather than requiring those nutrients to be replaced with fresh fertiliser.
IMIO, which is moving its headquarters from Vermont to Chicago, said the seed round brings its total funding to $16.5 million. The round was led by venture capital firm Sofinnova Partners, with participation from Cultivate Next (the venture arm of restaurant chain Chipotle), Starshot Capital, Grow Together Salinas, Earth Foundry and Serra Ventures. The company plans to use the money to expand its team, increase production capacity and build a new biomanufacturing and research and development facility in Chicago, targeted for completion in the second quarter of 2027.
IMIO’s flagship product line, called Re-Gen, is a biostimulant, a category of agricultural input that works by influencing a plant’s natural processes rather than supplying nutrients directly, the way a conventional fertiliser does. The company sells two versions, Re-Gen for Row Crops and Re-Gen for Produce, and both are registered as biostimulants in all 50 US states.
Unlike most biological crop inputs, which are designed to be absorbed into the soil or taken up by roots, Re-Gen is applied directly onto crop residue, the stalks, stubble and leftover plant material from a harvested crop. According to the company, the product contains a blend of naturally occurring, non-genetically-modified microbial strains that break down lignin and cellulose, the tough structural compounds in plant residue, releasing nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium that would otherwise stay locked up and unavailable to the next crop. The company estimates that a typical acre of corn stover, the stalks and leaves left after a corn harvest, holds about $134 worth of these three nutrients.
IMIO’s process grows each microbial strain separately rather than fermenting them together, so the company can control the exact ratio of strains in the final blend rather than letting one strain dominate during growth. The strains are then freeze-dried, a process also called lyophilisation, and blended into a powder with a shelf life of more than 12 months. Freeze-drying is gentler on living microbes than the heat-based spray-drying used for some competing biological products, which the company says helps preserve the viability of its lignin-degrading fungi by the time a farmer applies it. Manufacturing takes place at partner facilities in South Dakota under restricted-access protocols, and the product is typically applied in spring around planting time, so nutrients become available as the following crop grows.
The company said university and farm trials across more than 10,000 acres in the US Midwest in 2024 and 2025 produced an average corn yield increase of 11.9 bushels per acre, with individual results ranging from about 5 to more than 20 bushels per acre depending on how much residue was present and how fields were managed. One grower cited by the company, Kirk Stueve, said a 140-acre field treated with Re-Gen beat its historic yield record by 36 bushels per acre and cut his nitrogen costs by $45 to $50 per acre after using the product for a couple of seasons. These figures are company-reported and have not yet been published in an independently peer-reviewed study.
Beyond corn and other row crops, IMIO is marketing Re-Gen for Produce to growers of crops such as broccoli, Brussels sprouts and lettuce, and sees an additional opportunity in treating cover crops, which farmers plant between main growing seasons largely to protect and build soil rather than to harvest.
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