We trust that you're enjoying the rhythms of summer. It's a great time to recalibrate and spend time with family and friends. At Team Serra, we're in the home stretch of closing out one fund and preparing to launch another. Each season presents a new set of opportunities in the venture space, and we are excited for what's in store in the latter part of 2026. Enjoy the latest newsletter from Serra!

The Serra team is very pleased to announce its latest investment offering, the Serra Opportunities Fund. The fund was created with the specific purpose of investing in late-stage financing rounds of Serra portfolio companies and select deals from Serra's co-investor network. Due to the elongated venture cycle brought on by the macroeconomic challenges of the last four years, many Serra companies need a funding round to extend their runway through the ultimate exit. These are high quality companies with strong track records, often offering financing rounds with exceptional terms.

Serra will carefully evaluate which companies are expected to produce the strongest exits for the Fund. Our team is intimately familiar with our portfolio companies, as many have been associated with us for 5 to 10+ years. Additional deals selected from our co-investor network will enhance deal flow. Our collective inside knowledge gives us a key advantage in evaluating each of these investment opportunities.

WHY NOW?

The M&A/IPO logjam has created a late-stage buyer’s market that’s rare. Serra has access to strong companies extending favorable financing terms, with the potential for promising upside.

Tech valuations remain 20–30% below 2021 peaks, while U.S. corporates are sitting on over $2.5 trillion in cash — a strong setup for M&A activity. Global M&A deal volume increased by 40% year-over-year in 2025, with tech transactions specifically up 66%. After a three-year liquidity logjam that left LPs with nearly $200B in negative cash flow since 2022, the exit market finally reasserted itself in 2025.

WHY INVEST?

• Favorable Terms: Late-stage rounds often have very favorable investment terms.

• Shorter Exit Timeframes: The time to exit for most portfolio companies is expected to be 2 to 5 years.

• Excellent Returns: The Fund expects to produce 2X to 4X net returns for LPs.

COMPANIES CURRENTLY UNDER CONSIDERATION:

The Serra team is pleased to announce that it has invested in AgAnswers, the company that provides agrifood enterprises the tools they need to increase the reach and impact of the services they provide by building the "universal language" for agriculture. This enables AgAnswers to provide diverse solutions to their customers that overcome the patchwork of data formats that are prolific in the ag industry without having to hand-build every solution.

AgAnswers is Champaign-based and a University of Illinois spinout.

"The team was a major factor behind our conviction in AgAnswers,” commented Jack Marck, Associate at Serra. “It's extremely rare to find frontier-level computer scientists and AI engineers working alongside active farmers. We're excited to roll up our sleeves and lend our expertise to help them scale."

Quercus Biosolutions, a Serra Ag & Food Tech Fund II company, announced this week that it has closed its oversubscribed $5 Million Seed Round to build a new category of AI-Designed crop protection. Serra was the lead investor in the round.

Rob Schultz, Managing Partner at Serra Ventures, told AgFunderNews that “Serra had been an active investor in agtech since 2014 but had not invested in input startups due to the unknown cost and timeline profiles associated with discovering novel chemistry or biology. Quercus’ genAI approach flipped the script on our historical concerns.”

Schultz continued, “At our time of investment, Quercus had already demonstrated plant uptake and mobility, made significant progress on greenhouse validation, and shown a rapid design-iteration loop that let them move quickly from target to candidate.”

Quercus released a thorough summary of the deal and background information on the problems that the company is solving. Read below for an excerpt.

Crop protection is a roughly $80 billion global market on track to exceed $100 billion by 2030. Herbicides are its largest segment, more than 40 percent of the total, and weed control is where resistance pressure has advanced furthest. Growers in major row crop systems have watched their most dependable options narrow season by season, while the alternatives that promise a cleaner profile have not consistently matched the efficacy legacy tools have delivered. That gap, between the performance growers expect and what regulators and food markets increasingly require, is where Quercus has chosen to start, on a platform built to extend across crop protection. Because the practices at the center of regenerative agriculture - cover cropping and no-till among them - depend on reliable weed control, closing it carries consequences well beyond the farm gate.

Quercus designs its compounds using generative AI, engineering mini-proteins to bind validated biological targets with the efficacy and cost structure of chemistry. These designed mini-proteins are a new class of crop protection compounds, and they are the basis for the category the company is building. The generative design platform behind them carries a track record from well beyond agriculture: more than $30 million of development investment to date, and validated mini-proteins produced across multiple industries and applications. Because the active ingredient is a protein, it is designed to break down in the environment and to carry a favorable regulatory profile; and because the compounds are a fundamentally new modality, they can be directed at targets that fall outside existing resistance groups, giving growers a way to stay ahead while sitting alongside the chemistry already in their programs.

AgFunder, the premier source of information in the AgTech space covered the launch of Quercus in a high profile article. You can view the complete article here.

In the month of August, the Serra Ag & Food Tech Fund II will hold its final closing for investors. The team has been actively investing since the first close with 12 companies funded to date. We anticipate that the Fund will make three to four additional investments.

"This portfolio is exceptional," says Tim Hoerr, Managing Partner. "I strongly believe that the diverse mix of companies in this Fund will prove to be a winning combination for our investors."

While the AgTech sector has experienced some macro challenges over the recent years, there is an abundance of critical pain points that need to be solved with innovative tech solutions. We're encouraged that the companies comprising Ag Tech Fund I as well as the more recent additions in Ag & Food Tech Fund II are making exciting progress. The difficult operating environment has provided the opportunity to build standout, resilient companies.

• Breedr Featured in Farmers Guardian

• CamoAg and Pivot Bio Announce Multi-Year Agreement to Enhance Grower Engagement

• Fork Farms Innovation Highlighted at Midwest Agriculture Summit

• Inprentus Joins the National Security Technology Accelerator (NSTXL) as a Member

• iUNU Greenhouse Suppliers Responds to Cyclospora Outbreak: Lettuce Produced in Greenhouses Has a Near-Zero Chance of this Type of Contamination

• Swarm Engineering Says Real supply-chain crisis isn't visibility—It's decision latency