aid: agbiome
name: AgBiome
description: >-
  AgBiome was an agricultural biotechnology company headquartered in Research Triangle Park,
  Durham, North Carolina. Founded in 2012 by Scott Uknes, Eric Ward, Jeff Dangl, John Ryals and
  Paul Schulze-Lefert, it built the proprietary GENESIS discovery platform — a collection of more
  than 100,000 fully sequenced, isolated plant-associated microbial strains and hundreds of
  millions of gene sequences, screened with high-throughput assays for insect, disease and
  nematode control — and turned it into crop-protection biologicals. It commercialized the
  Howler and Theia biofungicides and had a third, Esendo, before the EPA, and it spun out the
  genome-editing venture LifeEDIT Therapeutics in October 2020 (acquired by ElevateBio in
  October 2021). Backed by Syngenta, Novozymes, Monsanto, ARCH Venture Partners, Polaris, the
  Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Pontifax and UTIMCO, the company nonetheless failed to raise
  further capital: it filed a North Carolina WARN notice in late 2023 covering its entire staff
  of 123, sold Howler and Theia to Certis Biologicals (a Mitsui & Co. subsidiary) in March 2024,
  and sold its platform assets to Ginkgo Bioworks in April 2024 for roughly $18.2 million in
  stock. AgBiome never published a developer program, public API, SDK, or machine-readable
  specification, and agbiome.com no longer serves the company site — it answers from a Nexcess
  shared-hosting placeholder under a certificate issued to CN=nxcli.net. This profile is
  retained as a historical record; there is no API surface to enrich.
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/agbiome/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
x-harvest-source-url: https://equityzen.com/company/agbiome
x-type: company
x-source: harvest:secondary-market
x-tier: stub
x-tier-reason: defunct-no-api-surface
x-status: defunct
x-founded: '2012'
x-shutdown-note: >-
  Filed a North Carolina WARN notice in late 2023 covering all 123 employees; sold the Howler
  and Theia biofungicides to Certis Biologicals in March 2024 and its microbial platform assets
  (115,000+ sequenced strains, 500M+ unique gene sequences, plus the development pipeline) to
  Ginkgo Bioworks on 2024-04-10 for approximately $18.2 million in Ginkgo Class A stock.
x-domain-status: placeholder
x-domain-note: >-
  agbiome.com still resolves (Cloudflare nameservers, Google Workspace MX) but the web origin is
  a Nexcess shared host (209.126.25.32) presenting a TLS certificate for CN=nxcli.net that does
  not match the hostname; the root returns the stock Nexcess placeholder page and every other
  path returns a bare Apache 403 or 404. It is NOT the AgBiome company site and is deliberately
  not wired as a Website pointer. The former harvest Website pointer was an EquityZen
  secondary-market listing page, which is a trading venue rather than a company web presence
  (roadmap#56); it has been moved to x-harvest-source-url. See
  well-known/agbiome-well-known.yml.
specificationVersion: '0.20'
created: '2026-09-12'
modified: '2026-09-12'
tags:
- Company
- Defunct
- Agriculture
- AgTech
- Biotechnology
- Microbiology
- Crop Protection
- Biologicals
- Life Sciences
- Research
tags_raw:
- Company
- Defunct
- Agriculture
- AgTech
- Biotechnology
- Microbiology
- Crop Protection
- Biologicals
- Life Sciences
- Research
apis: []
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
  email: info@apis.io
x-coverage:
  state: none
  reason: defunct
  detail: >-
    AgBiome wound down across 2023-2024 — all 123 staff on a WARN notice, Howler and Theia sold
    to Certis Biologicals in March 2024 and the microbial platform sold to Ginkgo Bioworks in
    April 2024 — and agbiome.com now answers from a Nexcess shared-hosting placeholder under a
    mismatched CN=nxcli.net certificate, returning a bare Apache 403 on every /.well-known/ path
    and 404 on /openapi.json, /llms.txt, /robots.txt and /apis.json, while api., docs.,
    developer., app. and status.agbiome.com are all NXDOMAIN and a Wayback sweep of every
    archived agbiome.com path from 2014 to 2026 finds no developer or specification URL.
  evidence:
  - url: https://agbiome.com/
    status: 200
  - url: https://agbiome.com/openapi.json
    status: 404
  - url: https://agbiome.com/llms.txt
    status: 404
  - url: https://agbiome.com/.well-known/agent-card.json
    status: 403
  - url: https://agbiome.com/.well-known/agent.json
    status: 403
  - url: https://agbiome.com/.well-known/security.txt
    status: 403
  - url: https://agbiome.com/apis.json
    status: 404
  - url: https://portal.agbiome.com/
    status: 525
  - url: https://blog.agbiome.com/
    status: 403
  - url: https://api.github.com/orgs/agbiome
    status: 200
  checked: '2026-09-12'
x-enrichment:
  date: '2026-09-12'
  status: minimal
  artifacts_added: 1
  pass: local-v3