Biographica, a British AI startup innovating how the agricultural industry develops new crop varieties, today announced an €8 million (£7 million) funding round to accelerate the creation of climate-resilient, productive and nutritious crops – addressing global food security challenges driven by climate change, population growth, and limited natural resources.
The round was led by Faber VC with participation from SuperSeed, Cardumen Capital, The Helm, EQT Foundation and Sie Ventures, and existing investors Chalfen Ventures, Entrepreneurs First, Nucleus Capital, Dhyan Ventures, Saras Capital and Ventures Together. The company also announced a new partnership with BASF | Nunhems, a leading seed companies.
“We’ve seen AI reshape pharma, turning trial-and-error pipelines into learnable biological systems – and it works. We’re bringing that same discipline to crops,” says Cecy Price, CEO of Biographica.
In the context of last year’s European investment activity, Biographica’s new round sits alongside a steady flow of capital into AI-enabled agricultural and plant-science companies.
In the UK, Wild Bioscience raised €51 million to advance AI-guided crop variety improvement, underlining investor appetite for computational approaches to plant genetics from the same country as Biographica.
Elsewhere, capital has flowed into adjacent parts of the agricultural value chain, including Source.ag, which secured €15.2 million to scale AI software for greenhouse operations, and Switzerland-based Ecorobotix, which raised €90 million to expand precision farming robotics. Funding has also reached automation and biological inputs, with SAIA Agrobotics closing a €10 million round for greenhouse robotics, ReSoil raising €4 million for regenerative agriculture projects, SugaROx securing €1.1 million to develop crop-enhancing biostimulants, and Messium raising €3.8 million for satellite-based crop analytics.
Taken together, these rounds represent roughly €175 million of disclosed funding moving through AI-driven AgriTech and agri-bio segments in 2025, positioning Biographica’s raise as part of a broader, data-led push to improve crop resilience, productivity and sustainability across Europe.
“Our partnerships with BASF | Nunhems and other leading seed companies show the industry is ready for AI-first approaches to trait discovery, to bring high-value crop varieties to market in seasons, not decades,” adds Price.
Founded in 2022, Biographica is an agricultural BioTech company applying breakthroughs from AI-driven drug discovery to design the next generation of crop traits. The company was founded by Cecy Price and Dominic Hall, who combine expertise in genetics, AI, and computational biology.
Price previously worked on the European launch of the world’s first gene-editing therapy and Hall earned his PhD in computational genomics where he developed machine learning models to map gene regulation.
According to the company, developing a new crop trait such as drought tolerance, disease resistance, or improved nutrition typically takes more than a decade and costs millions of dollars. The most significant and costly bottleneck is knowing which genes control key crop traits – knowledge that informs gene editing and breeding programmes.
Biographica’s proprietary AI platform reportedly solves this by pinpointing the most promising genetic targets within weeks – defining what to change, how, and why, to generate precise trait improvements – cutting crop development timelines by up to five years and reducing R&D costs by millions.
In pilots with leading seed and precision breeding companies, Biographica’s AI platform allegedly identified proven gene targets 12x faster than traditional methods.
Beyond speed, it can uncover novel targets that traditional methods miss, enabling entirely new, high-value traits to reach the market.
The company is now combining its AI-driven discovery with rapid experimental validation to create a “lab-in-the-loop” model – a self-improving cycle currently used in drug discovery that gives partners an increasingly rapid and reliable path to trait innovation.
“With climate change intensifying the pressure on agricultural systems, improving crop genetics is the most powerful lever we have to sustainably increase yields and build resilience,” said Sofia Santos, Partner at Faber VC. “Biographica is redefining how agricultural innovation happens, and this investment round will allow them to scale their impact globally.”
Biographica has demonstrated that deep technical partnerships can scale – the technology can be deployed at speed across crops and traits, in both breeding and gene-editing pipelines.
Early pilots have progressed into commercial agreements, with Biographica-identified targets already moving into testing pipelines.
The funding will be used to expand Biographica’s proprietary data collection, extend its AI platform to new crop traits, and deepen commercial relationships across the seed industry.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/01/global-food-security-concerns-drive-e8-million-raise-for-londons-agtech-startup-biographica/
