Vestaron Corp racks up $14 mln Series C

Vestaron Corp. has received an additional $4 million from Anterra Capital in its Series C round, raising the total funding to $14 million. Other investors in the Series C round included Cultivian Sandbox Ventures, Southwest Michigan First Life Science Venture Fund, Open Prairie Ventures, Pangaea Ventures and Michigan Accelerator Fund. Based in Kalamazoo, Mich., Vestaron is a producer of pesticides.

PRESS RELEASE

KALAMAZOO, MI–(Marketwired – Oct 28, 2014) – Vestaron Corporation, a company that designs environmentally friendly insecticides, announced today the final close of its Series C Financing. Anterra Capital, based in the Netherlands, added $4M to the $10M previously announced to bring total funding to $14M. Anterra Capital is jointly funded by Moonray Investors, the proprietary investment arm of FIL Limited, the parent company of Fidelity Worldwide Investment, and Rabo Private Equity, the proprietary private equity arm of Rabobank. The round also included Cultivian Sandbox Ventures, Southwest Michigan First Life Science Venture Fund, Open Prairie Ventures, Pangaea Ventures, Michigan Accelerator Fund and others.

“I’m very pleased to welcome Anterra to the Vestaron team. Their perspectives will be greatly valued on the Board of Directors, and their experience in food and agriculture will be invaluable to us going forward,” said John Sorenson, CEO of Vestaron. “We’re overwhelmed to have attracted so much interest from the international venture capital community.”

Philip Austin, a Partner in Anterra Capital, said, “We’re delighted to be supporting Vestaron. We’ve been watching the Company for several years now, and we feel the time is right to make an investment in this groundbreaking company. The commercialization of their first product is proving that natural peptides can be a valuable source of novel insecticides providing farmers with a crop protection tool that has the power of chemicals with the safety profile of biologicals.”

Vestaron exploits the natural insecticidal properties of a class of peptides which have potent insect killing potential, but which are safe to humans, birds, fish, and the environment, including honeybees. These peptides utilize new modes of action that have never before been used for insect control, and therefore do not suffer from insect resistance. In addition to the bioinsecticides, the Company is putting the genes for the peptides into crop plants, and is modeling the active sites of the peptides to identify synthetic mimics that also have a favorable safety spectrum.