Company: iyris
Founders: Ryan Lefers, Mark Tester and Derya Baran
Website: https://iyris.com/
About iyris
iyris (formerly RedSea), founded in 2018, is a leading sustainable AgriClimate Tech company, advancing commercial farming in hot climates globally with a mission to feed the world sustainably.
2023 was the hottest recorded year in history and farmers around the world are increasingly experiencing the consequences of extreme heat and water scarcity, which have combined to impact both their productivity and profitability. Pairing this with a rapidly growing world population makes the demand for food one of most important challenges today for humankind.
Putting the situation into numbers, current estimates suggest our planet will need to grow 50% more food by 2050. Global agriculture accounts for 70% of the drain on freshwater resources – increasing to 85-90% in harsh environments. Breaking the food-water-energy nexus via innovative, sustainable technologies, is therefore crucial.
Embarking on this mission, iyris has developed a platform of proprietary technologies which reduce energy and water consumption by up to 90% in their target markets.
iyris’ flagship product is SecondSky, a transparent heat-blocking greenhouse cover, which has been deployed at farms across the world and delivered reductions in energy usage by over 40% and water consumption by 30%. It achieves this by blocking excessive heat, maintaining a more consistent temperature and reducing heat stress on the plants. SecondSky is critically acclaimed, and won the esteemed Davidson Prize, which recognizes outstanding innovations in agricultural, food, and biological systems engineering, in 2023.
To date, iyris’ sustainable agriculture technologies are installed and used by growers in eleven countries across five continents, with the company entering new markets including Portugal, Spain and the UK in the past two years. iyris also has a growing portfolio of high-profile partnerships, for example with Red Sea Global in Saudi Arabia, Armando Alvarez Group in Spain, and Magrabi Agriculture in Egypt.
The company’s solutions are particularly salient as it is the sole global provider of technologies enabling agriculture in hot climates – with as many as 19 patents. While many AgTech companies focus on one element of the agricultural supply chain e.g., growing food, building greenhouses, robotics, iyris has developed a full suite of climate-adaptation technologies. They are designed to be immediately and easily implemented on-farm, and to have an immediate impact – while not demanding farmers to invest significant time and money to change their farming systems.
iyris’ focus on providing solutions to low to mid tech farming operations is also pertinent, as they represent more than 70% of all farmers globally. With installation costs low, iyris aims for payback to the farmer within a single crop season.
Following its recent rebrand from RedSea, iyris has cemented its transition to a pure-play technology company. Going forward, it will focus on the commercialization and development of its product pipeline within SecondSky and iyris Labs, and continue to push the boundaries of science and technology to enable sustainable food production.
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