Laurent de Crasto is an agricultural engineer specialised in viticulture, from Sup Agro Montpellier. He worked at the Institut National de l'Origine et de la Qualité in Paris and then co-founded two innovative industrial companies based in Bordeaux:
- WIT France in 2007, specialised in small volume wine packaging (15 employees, €2m turnover in 2016)
- In 2011, he co-founded VDLV (90 employees, €8m turnover in 2018) which develops E-liquids based on natural flavours, a leading company on the French market.
In 2012, he became a member and treasurer of Innovin, the New Aquitaine cluster for wine innovation.
In 2015, he created with Lionel Navarro the company ImmunizationImmunrise, specialised in the research and development of biotechnological solutions. In 2016, Immunrise's biocontrol subsidiary was created in Pessac, in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region of France, and focuses its research on marine microorganisms to treat plants.
Immunrise aims to develop innovative biocontrol solutions for crop protection. The conceptual approach initiated by its founders at the time of its creation is to identify marine microorganisms of agronomic interest. This simple and direct approach required long and tedious research and selection of microorganism strains, which were carried out by Dr Navarro's laboratory, of which Immunrise is the spin-off.