Trendlines Agrifood Innovation Center

The center is a collaborative initiative with Temasek Holdings, a Singaporean sovereign wealth fund. Temasek is the primary strategic backer, aligning the incubator's focus with Singapore's national priority to increase domestic food production. This partnership channels Israeli agrifood technologies toward Asian market applications.

The incubator follows a venture-builder model, creating companies internally rather than waiting for external pitches. It identifies commercially viable intellectual property from Israeli universities, agricultural research centers, and hospital systems. The internal team then matches the technology with a recruited management team to form a new startup.

Day-to-day operations and investment decisions are led by Vice President Sarai Kemp at the Misgav site. The center operates under the broader governance of Trendlines Group, a Singapore Exchange-listed company co-founded by CEO Steve Rhodes and Todd Dollinger, which sets the overall investment committee policies.

The center exclusively makes direct investments into the startups it creates. It does not operate as a fund-of-funds or invest in external venture capital funds. The capital deployment is in pre-seed and seed rounds of companies housed within its own incubator facility.

It targets the earliest stages of company formation — pre-seed and seed. The typical engagement begins before the company is legally formed, with the center providing the initial concept validation, laboratory space, and first institutional financing to reach a proof-of-concept or early pilot milestone.

Israel provides a high density of agronomic and water-related intellectual property combined with an entrepreneurial culture suited for venture building. The incubator leverages Israel's R&D ecosystem — advanced in areas like irrigation, crop protection, and aquaculture — while serving Singapore's strategic need to import and adapt these technologies for tropical food systems.

The Israeli Innovation Authority grants non-dilutive funding to startups within licensed incubators like Trendlines Agrifood Innovation Center. This government funding covers a significant portion of early-stage R&D costs, reducing the capital burden on the private investors and extending the runway for portfolio companies.