Biographica has secured €8 million in funding to expand its AI-driven platform for crop trait discovery amid growing global food security concerns.
London-based innovative agricultural technology startup Biographica announced it has raised €8 million (approximately £7 million) in a funding round led by Faber VC, with participation from SuperSeed, Cardumen Capital, The Helm, EQT Foundation, Sie Ventures, and several existing investors. The round also included a strategic partnership with BASF | Nunhems, a major seed industry company.
The startup focuses on using artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify genetic targets for various crops, aiming to improve their resilience traits such as drought tolerance, disease resistance, and nutritional content. Biographica’s approach is also designed to accelerate discovery cycles, allowing insights that traditionally took years to be generated in weeks, according to the company. The platform integrates predictive models with experimental validation in a “lab-in-the-loop” framework, combining AI-generated hypotheses with rapid testing.
Biographica reported that pilots with seed and breeding partners demonstrated its tech’s ability to identify promising genetic targets up to twelve times faster than conventional research methods. The company said the new capital will support the expansion of its data collection efforts, extend the AI platform to cover additional crop traits, and strengthen commercial relationships with breeding and seed companies.
The funding round comes at a dire time when global food security is under increasing pressure. According to the United Nations, around 670 million people were undernourished or experienced hunger in 2024, while nearly 2 billion suffer from micronutrient deficiencies. While the most acute and adverse outcomes were human-induced and driven by military conflicts and regional insecurity, environmental issues leading to weather extremes continuously remain among the top three reasons for hunger and malnurishment globally.
Climate change has affected roughly 20-25% of global cropland, with extreme weather events reducing yields for key staples like wheat, maize, and rice by 5-10% in some regions. At the same time, global population growth and urbanization are projected to further increase food demand by 50-70% by 2050, emphasizing the need for faster crop and agritech innovation.
Biographica’s founders indicated that AI-driven crop research can help address these challenges by enabling breeders to select for resilient and high-yield traits more efficiently. They also noted that accelerating discovery cycles could contribute to reducing post-harvest losses, which currently account for about one-third of global food production, and help farmers adapt to increasingly unpredictable growing conditions.
The company joins a growing number of European AgTech startups receiving investment for AI-enabled solutions in plant science, reflecting broader trends in funding and innovation aimed at improving agricultural productivity, sustainability, and resilience.
