MDC / Cicada Start-Up Innovation Development Program

Summary

​Growlab is an agriculture and food technology accelerator for early stage deep tech startup companies, running as a pilot in 2017 with support from the MLA Donor Company. The first pilot has run successfully with six companies participating and all still active as of March 2018. The companies have so far raised more than $2m in capital and $0.9m in grant funding between them. These companies are a split between somewhat established startups considering the red meat industry as an alternate market (3/6), companies relocating to Australia from overseas to address challenges in the Australian red meat sector (2/6) and spin outs of university research (1/6).

All six companies in Growlab cohort 1 are focusing on on-farm efficiency, the objective for future cohorts will be to continue to work with companies providing on farm efficiency gains, whilst expanding to include biotech and gene technologies as well as food technologies and food processing. In a short time Growlab has established a brand and promoted the ongoing collaboration with the MLA Donor Company, with over 200 media mentions including The Australian, ABC Rural and Fairfax Regional Press.

This program continued under P.PSH.1106.