
Name: Bonita Morales, PhD
Description: During a postdoc position at her university, Bonita helped develop a disease-resistant grapevine cultivar. She currently works in the ag-biotech industry as an expert in non-transgenic gene editing. She has grown concerned about the availability of diverse cultivars as climate change threatens to impact grape production in her area. Her close colleague at work is an engineer who wants to use his robotics background, but their company has no use for it. Through their informal conversations outside of work, Bonita thinks she can speed up the process of developing hardy grapevines that will benefit the grape production industry. She and her colleague have generated many high-throughput ideas on this topic, from plant transformation to maintaining the plants and collecting data. In addition, Bonita’s husband is an IT expert and has given her ideas for data collection, storage, and mining.
Progress to Date: For the last year, Bonita has developed a business plan and a team of engineers and IT professionals. She already has a solid network formed from her academic and industry careers and is ready to start pitching her idea to potential investors.
Scenario: Bonita has set up an appointment with a contact at Capital Fund Investing Services. She has her pitch deck ready to present. The slides below are an excerpt from her pitch, representing about one-third of her complete pitch deck.
Sample Screens from Vitis Genetics Pitch Deck
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View information on Bonita’s patent application for this case.