October 29, 2008

Organic Fertilizer Company Locates in Charleston

Andy Owens  /  Charleston Regional Business Journal

The co-founder of one of Charleston's high-tech success stories has invested in a soil-conditioning fertilizer company and has located the company's headquarters in Charleston. Jonathan Butler, co-founder of Automated Trading Desk, which was purchased by Citigroup last year for more than $600 million in cash and stock, said he wanted to remove himself from the software development cycle and do something different.

"The introduction of clean and green technologies is the next wave of entrepreneurship," he said.

Butler is a member of the board of the Charleston Digital Corridor Foundation, which acted as a matchmaker between him and the company that developed the organic fertilizer. The products were successfully sold overseas for years but had no North American distribution, sales or placement.

"My obligation is to align all those different issues in such a way that's going to take us to the promised land," said Ernest Andrade, Charleston Digital Corridor director. "We're more actively incubating this idea." Andrade said the city of Charleston has made a specific commitment to facilitate clean industries such as Surya Biofertilizers.

"It's all really come together through the Charleston Digital Corridor," Butler said. "We're dealing with an established product. It's a product that's been sold, just not sold here."

Butler said he has a waiting list of people who want to invest in Surya, including family members, but he's taking an approach he learned at ATD. "I'm very risk-averse, and I don't just jump into anything without researching it," Butler said. "We're being very cautious. We don't want to overexpand. We'll probably follow the ATD track of underexpanding."

He said the company is still developing partnerships and distribution agreements to implement a retail launch, but the company's products are for sale now through Surya Biofertilizer's website. The company plans to add two to three jobs in the Charleston area in the next year to facilitate product placement, and eventually plans to build a manufacturing facility in one of the state's more rural counties.

"A clean, green technology is the focus," Butler said. "This is really something that's going to be long term. This is something I want my kids to be involved in."