WILMINGTON, DELAWARE, U.S. — Corteva, Inc. plans to invest in Lavie Bio Ltd., a company based in Rehovot, Israel, that seeks to develop and commercialize environmentally friendly products for agricultural production.

Lavie Bio recently developed three biostimulant product candidates, LAV211, LAV212 and LAV 213, that demonstrated wheat yield improvements over a two-year period. The fields treated with the biostimulant product candidates produced greater yields than control fields 80% of the time.

Wilmington-based Corteva, which was part of the DowDuPont spin-off earlier this year, is a publicly traded company that has a heritage portfolio of DuPont Pioneer, DuPont Crop Protection and Dow AgroSciences. The company’s investment in Lavie Bio will include the exchange of all shares of Corteva’s subsidiary Taxon Biosciences along with an equity investment in Lavie Bio. Taxon Biosciences’ assets, which include a microbial collection, will be integrated in Lavie Bio’s pipeline.

Corteva will receive about 30% of Lavie Bio’s equity. Evogene, Ltd., the parent company of Lavie Bio, will hold about 70% of Lavie Bio’s equity. Corteva will have certain rights with respect to Lavie Bio’s corn and soy pipelines.

“This transaction demonstrates Corteva's ongoing commitment to bringing to market new and differentiated technologies for our customers," said Susanne Wasson, crop protection business platform president for Corteva. “We are pleased to collaborate with Lavie Bio, a leader in the field of agriculture biologicals, as we continue to focus on accelerating commercialization of customer-centered innovation in this high-growth sector.”

Lavie Bio uses a proprietary Computational Predictive Biology platform to help the company improve food quality, agricultural sustainability and productivity by developing microbiome-based agriculture biological products. Lavie Bio already is in a partnership with Corteva to develop biostimulant products for corn.

“We are extremely pleased with the combined Taxon acquisition and equity investment by Corteva, a world leader in the agricultural market, following close to two years of a co-development collaboration,” said Ofer Haviv, chairman of the board for Lavie Bio and president and chief executive officer for Evogene. “By providing both additional complementary technologies along with potential go-to-market pathways, we believe this transaction will significantly enhance Lavie's capabilities for the development and commercialization of next generation agriculture biological products.”