Cooling Crops

**Product and the concrete problem it solves.** Cooling Crops is addressing two linked failures in modern food production: soil degradation that makes water and nutrients less useful, and increasingly volatile temperatures that damage crops even when farmers have adequate land and irrigation. The company presents two field-applied products rather than a consumer-facing climate dashboard. CoolEmerge is a post-seeding soil treatment for specialty row crops. It is intended to rebuild a living biocrust, stabilize loose or degraded soil, improve water retention, reduce wind erosion, and create better conditions for germination. CoolGrowth is a topical canopy spray for trees, vines, orchards, and other perennial crops. It is intended to reduce plant temperature during heat events and help address insufficient winter chill or damaging frost. That distinction matters commercially: one product works through the soil and early crop establishment, while the other protects an existing canopy. The farmer's immediate reason to buy is yield stability, lower water loss, or reduced damage, while the broader public benefit is keeping productive land in use as climate stress intensifies. The company says its materials can be applied with existing agricultural equipment, which could reduce adoption friction compared with solutions that require new irrigation, protected structures, or a new crop variety.

**Core technology and how it actually works.** The technical thesis combines materials science, passive thermal engineering, and microbiology. For the soil product, the public technical description names cellulose nanocrystals and local cyanobacteria. The cyanobacteria produce polysaccharides that bind soil particles, allowing a biologically formed crust to stabilize the surface and improve its ability to hold water. The company and external descriptions connect that structure to lower wind erosion, improved seed emergence, and a cooler soil microclimate. For the canopy product, the reported mechanism is passive radiative cooling: specially formulated material is designed to emit part of the plant's absorbed thermal energy through atmospheric wavelength windows where greenhouse gases are relatively transparent. In practical terms, the spray is meant to lower leaf or plant temperature without fans, refrigeration, or continuous energy input. The official site describes the business as an academic spinout based on microbial photosynthesis, nanotechnology, and nano-biotechnology, and identifies the technology as patented, but it does not publish patent numbers, claim scope, formulation details, or freedom-to-operate analysis. The most useful technical claims are therefore bounded: the public record supports a defined mechanism and early field results, not a proven universal solution for every crop or climate.

**Market, customers, and go-to-market.** Cooling Crops sells into the agricultural-input chain, where adoption depends on measurable farm economics and compatibility with existing practice. Its likely customers include growers of row crops, fruit, nuts, and vines; seed and crop-input companies; fertilizer and agrochemical distributors; agricultural cooperatives; and organizations funding climate adaptation or food-security programs. The World Food Prize profile says the products are designed as simple blend-and-spray inputs and that the company works through local fertilizer and agrochemical partners in Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. That channel strategy is important for an early company because distributors already have farm relationships, application knowledge, and regulatory infrastructure. It also creates a dependency: the company must show that its formulation is stable, easy to store and mix, safe for equipment, compatible with local agronomy, and sufficiently profitable for a channel partner. The official website displays names and logos including the Israel Innovation Authority, Agnition, Agrifood Futures, Ravensdown, ICL, Metaphor Foods, Deloitte, and Hebrew University, but a logo display is not proof that each organization is a paying customer or commercial partner. The Israel Trade Commission's evokeAG 2026 report confirms that CEO Sagi Sheinkman represented Cooling Crops in a discussion with Australian growers, corporates, researchers, and investors about practical implementation and commercial validation. Public sources do not disclose pricing, signed distribution contracts, revenue, or customer concentration.

**Traction, funding, and third-party validation.** The company was incorporated in Israel in September 2024 and is described by Startup Nation Finder as an active startup headquartered in Jerusalem with a one-to-ten employee range and an R&D-stage product. Finder itemizes a $200,000 pre-seed round led by the Racah Nano Venture Fund in November 2024, a $480,000 Israel Innovation Authority non-equity grant in May 2025, a $15,000 support award associated with GrowingIL, a $100,000 SAFE involving Agnition Ventures in October 2025, and a further $50,000 grant in May 2026. Startupim reports approximately $845,000 across these disclosed events, although the public sources do not provide a full cap table or audited financing statement. Product validation is more visible than financial scale. The World Food Prize Foundation selected Cooling Crops among its 2026 Innovate for Impact top ten and describes early results for CoolEmerge including three-to-six degrees Celsius of soil cooling, tripled water retention, lower wind erosion, and improved carrot emergence. Calcalist and CTech separately covered the company in April 2026, describing a spray that can reduce plant temperature by up to six degrees and combining radiative cooling with cyanobacteria-based soil restoration. These are meaningful signals of external attention and field-oriented development, but most performance metrics remain company-reported or presented in a selection profile. The next validation step is independent, replicated, multi-season data tied to farm-level return on investment.

**Founders and team background.** Cooling Crops has a deliberately interdisciplinary founding and technical team. Startup Nation Finder identifies Sagi Sheinkman, Eyal Bagon, Prof. Oded Shoseyov, Prof. Nir Keren, and Prof. Yossi Paltiel as the founders or founding team. The official website lists Sheinkman as CEO and co-founder, describing experience commercializing innovations with research institutes, startups, and industry, including prior climate, biotech, and defense-related deal work. It lists Bagon as CTO and co-founder and credits him with leading an autonomous-vehicle initiative and building multidisciplinary teams. Prof. Shoseyov is identified as director of agriculture and is a Hebrew University professor in protein engineering and nanobiotechnology with a history of scientific entrepreneurship. Prof. Keren leads biology, Prof. Paltiel leads physics, and Yarden Schindler is listed as microbiology development lead. This mix is well matched to the product: agricultural deployment, thermal physics, microbial biology, and nanomaterials all matter to the proposed mechanism. It also creates execution complexity. A small company has to turn academic discoveries into stable formulations, conduct trials, meet input regulations, build channel partnerships, and support growers across different crops. The public website does not disclose tenure, full-time status, headcount by function, or how intellectual property and university rights are allocated. Founder and scientific quality are positive signals, but commercialization capacity remains a central diligence question.

**Competitive dynamics.** Cooling Crops competes against a broad set of approaches rather than a single direct rival. Conventional alternatives include irrigation expansion, shade netting, plastic mulches, frost fans, heaters, chemical dormancy breakers, soil conditioners, synthetic polymers, and crop-protection products. Large incumbent suppliers such as Bayer Crop Science, Syngenta, and Corteva can bundle seed genetics, crop chemicals, biologicals, agronomic advice, and distribution, giving them a significant advantage in trials and market access. Biological-input companies and microbial soil-health vendors compete for the same resilience budgets through different mechanisms. Specialized radiative-cooling coating companies and agricultural anti-stress sprays are adjacent competitors for CoolGrowth, while regenerative soil and biocrust projects are adjacent competitors for CoolEmerge. Cooling Crops' potential advantages are concrete: (1) a sprayable workflow that can use existing farm equipment; (2) a two-product architecture that addresses both soil and canopy stress; (3) a mechanism that aims to reduce temperature without an energy-intensive cooling system; and (4) a combination of material, biological, and agronomic know-how that may be difficult to reproduce as one formulation. The vulnerabilities are equally clear. Formulations may behave differently by crop, soil, humidity, and application timing; large suppliers can copy or bundle features; and no public source yet establishes granted patent breadth, durable formulation IP, or independent superiority over cheaper farm practices.

**Defense, security, and resilience dual-use relevance.** Cooling Crops is not a defense contractor, and no public source reviewed here identifies a Ministry of Defense contract, military customer, classified program, or defense-specific formulation. Its strategic relevance is nevertheless credible through food and water resilience. National security can be weakened by drought, salinization, heat waves, crop failure, disrupted fertilizer imports, or damaged irrigation infrastructure. A treatment that helps farmers maintain production on existing land while retaining more water can support civil-defense continuity, emergency agricultural recovery, and allied food-security planning. The resilience value is especially relevant in arid and semi-arid regions, where the marginal value of water retention and heat protection is high and where food production is constrained by the same stresses that drive security dependence. Seed- or spray-level deployment is potentially useful because it does not require a new fleet of machines or a large construction program, which could matter after a disaster or during supply-chain disruption. The Israeli origin is contextually relevant because the team is developing around water-limited agriculture and has engaged international agricultural partners. The correct calibration is adjacency, not fielded defense capability: the technology may strengthen strategic food production, but public evidence does not show military procurement, operational testing, or direct use in a security mission.

**Growth stage, trajectory, and key diligence risks.** Cooling Crops is best classified as early. It has moved beyond an academic idea into an incorporated company, named products, grants, international presentations, early field results, and a visible partner ecosystem, but it remains small, in R&D or pilot-stage commercialization, and has not disclosed revenue, repeat-customer metrics, commercial volumes, or a complete financing history. The growth path is plausible if the company can validate results across crops and climates, obtain regulatory approvals, secure distribution or licensing agreements, and show that a grower earns more from the treatment than it costs. The most important diligence risks are: (1) **biological and agronomic variability**, because an intervention that works in one crop, soil, or stress profile may not generalize; (2) **measurement risk**, because yield and temperature results depend heavily on controls, season, irrigation, and application timing; (3) **regulatory risk**, since product classification and approval requirements vary across countries and crops; (4) **manufacturing risk**, including formulation shelf life, batch consistency, storage, mixing, and compatibility with existing sprayers; (5) **commercial risk**, because public partner displays and competition selections do not prove recurring sales; (6) **intellectual-property risk**, because the public record says patented without revealing the patent family or enforceable claims; and (7) **capital and team risk**, because multi-season trials and international channel development require more resources than the disclosed funding and small team may support. Milestones worth tracking are independent farm-scale trials, regulatory clearances, named repeat customers, channel agreements, cost-per-hectare economics, and evidence that water retention and heat protection persist outside selected demonstrations.