AgroSpheres

As immigrants from developing countries, Payam Pourtaheri (who is from Iran) and Ameer Shakeel (from Pakistan) had seen how synthetic pesticide use and misuse contaminated the environment. As students at the University of Virginia, they founded AgroSpheres to make bio-based crop protection that could replace those chemicals. Their proprietary bioprocessing and manufacturing AgriCell platform, for which they have 30 patents issued or pending globally, enables a suite of biocontrol products as alternatives to synthetic chemicals.