By Max Barnhart
More than a decade ago, Travis Bayer cofounded Sound Agriculture, a company focused on using the natural interactions between plants and microbes to improve fertilizer efficiency.
The company launched its first product in 2019 and was raising millions of dollars from prominent investors. Then, sometime around 2020, an R&D team at Sound began developing a new technology.
Sound researchers found a way to modify epigenetic markers on crops’ DNA in a way that could improve yield, decrease the need for pesticides, and enhance desirable traits. “We realized that this was a platform that really needed its own team, its own capital, its own focus,” Bayer says.
In 2024, Sound spun off Decibel Bio as an independent company to develop the epigenetic technology and take it to market. Bayer stepped away from Sound to become CEO of the new firm, which remained in stealth until the next year.
Decibel’s goal is to improve crops without resorting to the years-to-decade-long processes now required to develop new crop varieties. The world of agriculture is going through a lot of change right now—not just a changing climate but also changing consumer preferences,” Bayer says. “The tools that we have to create new and better crop varieties are really, really powerful, but they’re really slow.”
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