Kleiner Perkins Invests in Seed Company as It Sees Food Shortage

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the U.S. venture capital firm that provided startup financing to Amazon.com Inc. and Google Inc. (GOOG), is investing in a seed company as it forecasts food will become a “global problem of huge dimensions” over the next decade.

“We just invested in a seed company that is essentially collecting seeds from around the world,” Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, said in an interview from Lisbon today.

“One of the biggest problems we see in the horizon on the next 10 years is food,” he said. “If you identify a problem like food, you have to begin to start to experiment with solutions.”

Komisar declined to provide the name of the seed company as the deal has not been made public yet.

With 15 funds under management valued at “several billion” dollars, Kleiner Perkins is also investing in water companies as a lack of water resources in the “next few years” may become a problem, Komisar said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Henrique Almeida in Lisbon at halmeida5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jerrold Colten at jcolten@bloomberg.net