🔒Ag industry vet Klemm leads AI-backed pesticide development startup Enko into commercialization phase

“Mother Nature always wins,” said Anthony Klemm, the new CEO of crop-protection startup Enko.

Klemm, the product of a family farming background, should know.

“I grew up on a grain and livestock farm in central Iowa, and spent my entire career in the ag field,” he said. “I graduated from Iowa State, with a degree in agriculture, and I have an MBA from Purdue with a focus in agriculture as well.”

His acknowledgment of Mother Nature’s supremacy doesn’t mean Klemm isn’t going to try to slow her down.

He’s just taken the reins at the eight-year-old Mystic-based company that’s applying artificial intelligence-boosted drug discovery techniques to develop new pesticides.

The company was founded by Jacqueline Heard in Woburn, Mass., in 2017, and moved to Mystic in 2021, buying a lab and greenhouse space first built by Pfizer and then operated by Monsanto.

Tom Meade, the company’s original chief science officer remains, but Heard has stepped aside from the corner office, becoming instead a part-time adviser.

“I’ve worked with over 200 startups and this is very normal for a founder who’s building a company and growing it to then step aside and have the next generation of management come in and try to move towards commercialization,” said Dave Wurzer, Enko’s chief financial officer.

Wurzer says Heard’s retirement comes at an inflection point as the company’s technology approaches maturation.

“Now, as we go to commercialization, and we go to sell our products in the marketplace, we have someone such as Tony who has done that before and has worked in a commercial marketplace very successfully,” said Wurzer.

‘Paradigm shift’

Klemm has spent most of his career at the company that’s now known as Corteva, previously Dow and Dow Dupont. Most recently, he was vice president of global business development and licensing at Corteva Agriscience, where he led the strategic growth and innovation of the company’s seeds business unit.

He still lives in Des Moines, Iowa, and is spending about two weeks each month in Mystic.

“Jacqueline’s retirement was an opportunity for her to pass the reins on to us to be able to take it where my specialties lie, which is really around the business development and commercialization component, and to take that to the next level,” Klemm said.

What attracted him to Enko, he says, was the opportunity to oversee something he sees as a “paradigm shift” in crop protection.

Enko uses AI to screen billions of compounds at the start of its discovery pipeline, searching for active ingredients that bind to certain chemical targets in a pest. Its aim is to make compounds that are ultra-specific to the species farmers want to eliminate — be it a weed, fungus, root worm or aphid — while having no adverse effects on benign species or the environment.

“In each one of these tubes is the entire collection of chemistry that we screen,” said Meade, Enko’s chief science officer, standing in the laboratory holding up a set of plastic tubes less than an inch long. “There are trillions of molecules in each of those tubes. We get massive amounts of data.”

Enko’s process can screen 17 billion molecules at the start of a single experiment, generating over a billion genomic sequences and close to a terabyte of data.

“There’s no way you can manually sort through all this stuff,” Meade said. “We use AI to understand that data, and then because we have this really rich data set, we use AI to build models to make predictions about things that weren’t in the data.”

That scale of discovery is the company’s secret sauce. Meade says Enko’s bigger competitors in the pesticide space typically might screen 50,000 to 75,000 unique molecules in a year.

In the last two years, Enko has also been investing in robotics in its labs for repetitive testing processes so that it can further speed its discovery pipeline and free up scientists to do more creative work.

“These are really focused on increasing productivity but also quality. The reproducibility we get from a robot is that much better,” said Meade.

Enko has also installed a solar field at the back of its building, which powers not only new LED lighting in the greenhouses, but all of the building.

Speed to market

Klemm, meanwhile, is most concerned with the efficiency the company is generating in being able to bring products to the market.

“What we’re doing here allows us to reduce that cost of R&D by about 90% versus traditional methods, and do it about 75% faster than the current traditional methods,” he said. “Those are the paradigm shifts that I’m talking about.”

For hard-pressed farmers, he says, cutting costs on raising crops is essential.

“At almost break-even prices right now, especially as we look at tariffs and everything that’s going on in the world and what our growers are facing — every cent counts,” he said. “Being able to bring molecules to the market faster, cheaper is crucial.”

The startup has so far raised $150 million over several fundraising rounds. Wurzer, the CFO, says the company is “always in fundraising mode.”

“We have cash to the end of ‘26, but we also have a very strong investor syndicate that is something that we can leverage,” he said.

Enko doesn’t yet have any products in regulatory review, but some are close, and it’s continuing to cultivate partnerships with bigger companies that it hopes will facilitate the next step to commercialization.

“One of our new herbicides that we just got through having our field trials in Europe is showing excellent control of black grass, which is a major challenge for our European wheat farmers,” Klemm said. “The space that Enko is focused on is about a $73 billion market worldwide, and it’s growing at 3% to 4% yearly.”

In addition to black grass, which can negatively impact wheat and barley crop yields, Enko’s pesticide pipeline is targeting corn root worm; Asian rust, which is a fungal disease; the “superweed” Palmer Amaranth; aphids; and white flies.

The ultimate timeline to getting a product on the market will depend on the regulatory journey. Typically in the U.S., that has meant a five- to seven-year review period, but the Trump administration’s changes have brought uncertainty.

“Full transparency, right now with everything that’s happening with government agencies and changes in the (Environmental Protection Agency), those timelines have all been, let’s say, disrupted,” Klemm said.

Enko is also looking to other jurisdictions where the journey may be more predictable. In Australia, for instance, regulatory review can be achieved in two years.

“We need functional regulatory bodies and functional government agencies to continue to bring technologies and move technologies forward so that those are available to our growers, to be able to continue to meet the needs that they have,” Klemm said.