In the spring of 2024, Ellie Sangree and Jesse Wexler, co-founders of Eutrobac, stood in front of judges at the University at Albany and won the New York Business Plan Competition Grand Prize. They walked away with $25,000 and set to work building an IP portfolio, raising capital, developing the product and forging the connections and credibility that would carry them to an acquisition two years later.
Last month, Eutrobac was acquired by Agriment Services, Inc. (ASI), a North Carolina-based company that has served livestock producers across the country for over 30 years. It is the kind of outcome the NYBPC was built to produce.
“Winning the NYBPC wasn’t just the money — though the money absolutely mattered,” said Wexler, who joined ASI as Vice President of Sales and Marketing as part of the deal.
“It was the signal. It told partners, investors and potential customers that what we were building was real,” said Wexler. “Every door that opened after that competition traces back to it in some way.”
The Technology
At the center of Eutrobac is the NutriFilter™, the flagship technology developed by Sangree at Hamilton College and the product that ultimately attracted ASI’s attention. The NutriFilter™ is designed for swine and livestock operations, where it demonstrates a unique and flexible capacity to rapidly remove ammonium and — where required — total nitrogen from lagoon systems.
The technology has also shown an ability to prevent struvite formation through strategic placement on farm operations, addressing a chronic and costly challenge for producers across the country. Struvite — the mineral deposits that accumulate in pipes and barn infrastructure — is the kind of persistent operational headache that eats into margins year after year.
“Struvite is one of those problems that farmers deal with constantly with no elegant solution,” said Sangree, who will continue supporting technology development and deployment on a consulting basis following the acquisition.
“The resources and support from the NYBPC, mentors and the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program gave us the opportunity to find farmers, uncover the problems they were having and design the NutriFilter™ to fit the market,” said Sangree.
Behind the product, Eutrobac built an IP portfolio that includes a pending USPTO patent, a registered trademark and proprietary trade secrets — five years of research and field work that formed the foundation of the acquisition agreement with ASI.
The Journey
Throughout Eutrobac’s development over the last 4 years, the support of upstate New York’s entrepreneurship ecosystem has been integral to Ellie and Jesse’s success.
In the summer of 2023, Eutrobac began customer discovery work with RIT’s Don Pophal and deepened its technical development through the NYS Center of Excellence in Healthy Water Solutions. That fall, the team was accepted into Cornell’s regional AgCorps I-Corps program, where they began working with advisor Ken Rother. Through that program, Cornell supported their travel to the American Farm Bureau Federation conference in Salt Lake City — a trip Wexler still points to as one of the most important things that happened to the company.
“We went to Salt Lake City and had hundreds of conversations with farmers and industry people,” he said. “That trip is where we figured out exactly what problem the NutriFilter™ needed to solve. The product that got acquired is a direct result of what we learned there.”
Through the 2023–24 academic year, Eutrobac ran capstone engineering programs at both Syracuse University and RIT to develop the NutriFilter™ into something field-ready, leading to a pilot at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Then came the NYBPC.
After the competition, the team completed protofacturing and manufacturing programs at Rev: Ithaca Startup Works. In December 2024, Eutrobac closed a $160,000 pre-seed round from Angel investors and FuzeHub, funding further experimentation in upstate New York. The data from those experiments, combined with additional pilots the following season, provided the proof of performance that motivated ASI to swoop in and acquire the company.
The Acquisition
On April 30, 2026, Eutrobac and ASI announced the deal. ASI President Ronnie “Geno” Kennedy called the NutriFilter™ an opportunity to help clients dramatically reduce metal degradation in hog barns, manage nitrogen and phosphorus loads, and prevent struvite before it becomes a problem.
In ASI’s press release, Geno also emphasized that “We’re buying Eutrobac not just for their technology, but for their people as well. We are confident that Jesse and Ellie represent the future of our industry, and we’re proud to have them as a part of our team.”
“Geno and his team have spent 32 years building one of the most trusted names in this industry,” Wexler said. “I’m joining ASI because I believe we can take what they’ve built and grow it across North America. That’s the opportunity.”
For Upstate Capital and the broader NYBPC community, Eutrobac’s path — from a college invention to a field-tested, acquired technology — reflects what the competition is designed to set in motion. The prize money funded pilots. The judges became connectors. The ecosystem did its job.
“We didn’t win the NYBPC and then figure everything out on our own,” Sangree said. “New York’s entrepreneurial support system carried us. The competition was the start of that, and we are endlessly grateful.”