Not sure how to make this sound non-judgmental, but… you pee a lot.
Like, a lot — the average adult produces 100-150 gallons of urine every year.
It takes a bold company to raise its hands (which, let’s assume, it washes over and over again) and commit to collecting and making good use of mankind’s pungent cocktail.
Toopi Organics has been richly rewarded for doing so, with a $17.2m funding round for its urine-based biostimulants, per AgFunderNews.
And biostimulants are…?
They are substances applied to seeds and plants to promote growth, optimize health, enhance nutrient uptake, and/or increase crop yield.
Using urine as a biostimulant isn’t a new concept — it’s been used as fertilizer for thousands of years, in fact — but French startup Toopi takes it a step further by fermenting humanity’s bladder juice.
The end result: a product, Lactopi Start, that Toopi claims is so effective, it can reduce the need for synthetic fertilizers by up to 50%, upping sustainability and lowering costs across the agricultural sector.
Sounds great — what’s next?
Toopi’s goal is to cover 600k hectares of European crops with its biostimulant by 2027, which will take an extraordinary amount of pee — specifically, 2m+ liters.
Enter the infusion of capital, meant to expand Toopi’s urine collection network. Its partners already include highway rest stop operators, a company that leases port-a-potties to music festivals, and now a French theme park.
Following the essential collection part of the operation, it’ll store and convert its sloshing buckets into biostimulants at two new facilities in France and Belgium.
Then, Toopi will start selling its product far and wide, in hopes it can, uh, catch the fertilizer business with its pants down.
