Natura Incubator and Flag Holding, a private equity fund based in Abu Dhabi, announced the signing of a historic agreement to partner in creating Agtech Innovation Centers in Israel and the UAE.
Flag Holdings, led by Managing Partner Mr. Ahmed Ali Al Sarkal, will become the one of eight (8) international agricultural companies to support Natura’s ambitious plans to create no less than eighty (80) new globally disruptive companies in Agtech (including Food-Tech and Climate-tech) until 2030, from its new home in Sderot.
The incubator is led by Oren Heiman, an Israeli-American businessman who for eighteen (18) years ran the New York law firm Shiboleth and Hagay Sarusi, the founder and director of the Natura Fund, which operates in the agtech field and is a world leader in aquaculture developments.
“Our partnership with Natura Incubator is part of our long-term strategic plan to increase our involvement in the science of Agriculture for the benefit of the UAE, the region and the globe” stated Ahmed Ali Al Sarkal and added “My recent visit to Israel, which included a tour of the Volcani Center (ARO), of the Faculty of Agriculture in Hebrew University and of other agtech centers of excellence in Israel, demonstrated to me that Israel has unique capabilities to create solutions for the global food crisis through science and innovation. I have found Hagay Sarusi and Oren Heiman to be honest professionals who have created a unique global model, with a strong financial structure for incubation of large scale Agtech innovations”.
The parties participated in a celebrative signing of the joint venture agreement, which includes a $5M investment by Flag Holding, participation in the board and investment committee, and joining forces to create a sister-incubator in the UAE in the near future.
Earlier that week, Natura and Evogene Ltd., a leading computational biology company focused on revolutionizing product discovery and development in multiple life-science based industries, announced a commercial cooperation which will include an innovation lab at Natura’s incubator, supported by Evogene’s state-of-the-art biological computation tools.
In the celebratory signing ceremony, Nir Arbel, CPO of Evogene stated “We are very much impressed with the team and vision of Natura, set to be launched this spring, and with Natura’s global network of partners. We see their platform as a promising avenue to bring a new pool of innovative companies and to develop novel products, while we can provide Natura`s suite of portfolio companies with access to our Computational Predictive Biology (CPB) platform and our 3 tech-engines. Our goal is to speed up and make more efficient their products discovery and development processes, and most importantly, increase the probability of reaching a winning product”.
Hagay Sarusi, head of Business Development and Natura’s investment committee added “Six members of our management recently spent a full day of meetings and tours in Evogene’s farm and labs and met with Evogene’s senior management. We were very much impressed with the professional team, the lab and the intellectual property created by Evogene over the years. Through their tools, we believe that Evogene can expand the scientific opportunities in our companies and dramatically reduce the time to develop technologies within our incubator.”
Oren Heiman, CEO of Natura, summarized “we started on a journey to create a global Agtech incubator in Israel, which will lean on Israeli science and will provide scientists and entrepreneurs with the highest possible level of tools and resources to succeed and improve global food security. A global network of partners such as Flag Holding and a set of world-renown technologies such as Evogene’s tools are just some of the unique opportunities provided to our 80 soon-to-be-incubated technologies.