Scott Horner

Scott Horner is a venture and private-equity investor with more than 20 years of experience concentrated in life sciences. He is currently a Managing Director with dsm-firmenich Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of the DSM–Firmenich group. Before that, he was a Managing Director and one of the founders of Middleland Capital, a Washington, D.C.–based firm (founded circa 2009) that invests in technology companies across the food, agriculture, and sustainability sectors. At Middleland he built and managed a portfolio spanning functional ingredients, therapeutics, agriculture, diagnostics, and animal health.

Earlier in his career, Horner was a Managing Director at Third Security, LLC, a private-equity firm focused on biotechnology and pharmaceutical opportunities, where he assessed the technical merit and commercial viability of prospective investments and took on interim operating roles within portfolio companies. Prior to Third Security, he was a founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Pathologics, LLC, a point-of-care diagnostics company based in Rochester, New York.

Horner holds a Ph.D. in Bioorganic Chemistry and an M.S. in Biophysics from the University of Rochester (School of Medicine), and a B.S. in Biochemistry from the State University of New York at Albany. His scientific training underpins a deeply technical, science-first approach to evaluating startups.

Across his career, the 20-plus portfolio companies Horner has managed have collectively raised well over $2 billion and produced multiple public and private exits. He has served on the Board of Directors of MycoTechnology, PlantResponse Biotech, Blue Prairie Brands, and Benson Hill Biosystems, and as a board observer for Advanced Animal Diagnostics, Vive Crop Protection, ZeaKal, and Virgin Plants.

• Invests in early-stage technology companies in food, agriculture, functional ingredients, and life sciences, with an emphasis on platform science and defensible IP.
• Backs companies solving real agronomic, nutritional, or health challenges — he has spoken about being drawn to "the opportunity to see so many unique technologies being applied by startups across such a diversity of challenges."
• Values elegant, science-led solutions: on the ZeaKal investment he cited "such an elegant, simple and straightforward approach, leveraging some creative protein engineering to allow this increase in the production of oil within soy."
• Takes an active, hands-on role — regularly joins boards as director or observer rather than a passive check-writer.
• Comfortable across the capital stack from seed/Series A into growth rounds, and across both agtech and human/animal health applications of biotech.