An incubator is only as good as the companies that come out of it. Missouri Innovation Center has been able to walk alongside multiple innovative entrepreneurs as they sought the resources, support, and focused space where they could turn their ideas into real-world companies.
Some of these brands have emphasized consumer products, others deep tech. Many have invested heavily in life science solutions, including Elemental Enzymes. Founded by Missouri University alumni, this groundbreaking biotechnology company came to MIC in 2011 with a revolutionary agtech concept and spent the next few years using the incubator’s physical, mentoring, and financial resources to build out a business plan and ultimately launch a successful agtech brand.
Below is the story of Missouri Innovation Center’s role as a top-level incubator in mid-Missouri and how it helped Elemental Enzymes find sustainable success in a competitive field with high startup costs.
The Story of Elemental Enzymes
Elemental Enzymes was founded by Brian and Katie Thompson in 2011. At the time, the couple were newlyweds. Katie Thompson was wrapping up her Ph.D., and Brian Thompson was completing his postdoc. As entrepreneurially-minded individuals, the pair were looking for a high-utility business idea that could use their areas of scientific expertise to create high-value, practical, real-life solutions.
By 2011, after ideating with multiple people, they settled on Elemental Enzymes, a company that would specialize in enzymes, peptides, and biochemistries for sustainable agriculture. This was based on a technology that used microbes to make and stabilize enzymes to amplify soil and cultivate healthy plants in sustainable ways. After focusing on soil remediation for the first two years of the company, they pivoted to a wider emphasis on agriculture tech in 2013, at which point the company found its stride, gaining momentum rapidly and producing a string of successful commercial products.
Elemental Enzymes Looks for Space and Tools to Grow
Katie and Brian Thompson launched their company in 2011, but they had a long road ahead. They had the core elements needed for a successful company. However, launching a life sciences enterprise requires a long runway and plenty of support. These pieces began to fall into place over the following years.
For example, they raised around $1 million in seed funding in 2012 and received the Missouri Small Business & Technology Development Center (SBTDC) Rising Star of Innovation award in 2012. However, they needed more than funding and recognition for good business planning. They required space, equipment, and entrepreneurial guidance. They turned to the local, affordable, and accessible option of the Missouri Innovation Center as a solution.
The Role of the Missouri Innovation Center
As Brian and Katie Thompson looked for ways to put Elemental Enzymes in motion while bootstrapping their idea with funding from friends, family, and their own credit cards, they settled on Missouri Innovation Center as a way to maximize every dollar.
They saw MIC as a well-equipped incubator with affordable and flexible pricing options. In the words of Dr. Katie Thompson, “I can rent a tiny space and get in for not very much, and they had an autoclave and the lab infrastructure that we really, really needed for our product concepts and that validation.”
Thompson added that, along with the equipment, MIC offered fractionalized spaces that were small enough to fall in their startup budget, “We started off really tiny. We were renting a quarter of a lab, which is like one row of like two desks, and that’s how we got our foot in the door. From there, we just tried to use every resource that we could […] that was geared to help entrepreneurs and startups that we could possibly get our hands on.”
MIC’s resources expanded far beyond high-pressure steam and sterilization equipment. It included a variety of tangible and intangible elements, including office space, funding connections, and both networking and mentorship opportunities.
MIC was able to connect the founders to key investors, including one of the incubator’s capital partners, Centennial Investors Angel Network. The Thompsons were also able to participate in business plan competitions.
They worked with others at the incubator to develop a plan that emphasized the key selling points of their new agritech solution. Essential in this plan was an emphasis on the ability of their new technology platform to pivot to market needs. They submitted a business plan to the RICE Business Plan Competition. Out of 400 submissions, they were one of 40 chosen to present to investors live in Houston. While they didn’t succeed in winning the competition, this gave them valuable business experience and a future fund-matching offer to amplify their own investing efforts.
In addition to this critical entrepreneurial starting point, the Elemental Enzymes founders made sure to use the full resources of the incubator to give them the best chances of long-term success. They were offered access to university research farms and equipment, learned from rubbing shoulders with other startups and potential collaborators, and had access to donated supplies from companies like Pfizer that helped with experimentation, validation, and other lab work.
The incubator resources went beyond their agritech specialties, too. Dr. Katie, for example, took classes to learn Quickbooks and basic business administration. From affordable lab space to access to essential resources, like a chemical recycling center, MIC was a source of entrepreneurial infrastructure that is critical for life science and similar startups to succeed.
Elemental Enzyme’s Business Growth and Achievements
Thanks in part to the support, resources, and infrastructure of Missouri Innovation Center, Elemental Enzymes was able to survive a lengthy incubation stage that lasted from 2011 until its first commercial partnership in August of 2013. Shortly after that, it pivoted from a focus on soil remediation technology to a wider application of agritech solutions.
This has led to the launch of 17 commercial products, four of which came in 2018 alone. Some of these expanded to plant nutrient efficiency, an application angle also developed through MIC connections. Others came from the development of peptide biopesticide products or the ability to grow test corn crops at MIC.
Partnerships with major agricultural companies followed, along with the rapid growth of the company. By 2015, Elemental Enzymes was growing so fast that it ran out of space and had to relocate to St. Louis, where it also expanded into manufacturing and R&D. It continued its affiliation with MIC even after business expansion and today has become a corporation with 100 employees. In 2022, it generated $18.6M in revenue — a figure that doubled annually over both of the previous years. In 2023, it completed a $50M private equity round for a minority stake, and as of the latest data, Elemental Enzyme products are impacting 17M acres across the US, Canada, and Australia.
The Successful Incubation of Elemental Enzymes
Elemental Enzymes was founded in 2011 and grew from a quarter-lab startup to a company with nearly $20M in revenue and 100 employees in a dozen years. One of the most critical stages of this process came from 2011 to 2015 when the bootstrapped enterprise leaned heavily on the resources and infrastructure of MIC’s labs, network, and staff to get its operation up and running.In the words of the Elemental Enzymes brand, “We are legacy innovators, with a persistent curiosity to find solutions easily implemented within existing systems.” MIC is honored to have played a key role in that legacy by providing the infrastructure and support required to help founders Katie and Brian Thompson turn their ideas into paying jobs, commercial products, and a healthy, thriving business with incredible potential.
