Computomics raises €6.3M to scale climate-smart plant breeding
Tech.eu Tamara Djurickovic
German agritech Computomics just raised €6.3M to grow its crop-breeding software business. It uses AI to predict how plant varieties handle heat and drought years before farmers would normally find out.
Based on reporting by Tech.eu, Tamara Djurickovic — read the original for the full story.
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Computomics, a Tübingen-based company founded in 2012, has closed a €6.3 million Series B round to push its climate-smart breeding platform into wider commercial use. Convent Capital Agri Food Fund led the round with €5 million, joined by existing backers High-Tech Gründerfonds, MBG Baden-Württemberg and Amathaon Capital, plus the company's own founders and scientific advisers. The EU's InvestEU Fund also chipped in support.
What Computomics actually does is feed genomic data, weather patterns, soil information and field trial results into machine learning models that try to guess how a specific crop genotype will hold up in a specific environment. That's the pitch, anyway: instead of waiting years to watch a variety struggle in a real field, breeders get a prediction earlier in the process. The company's ×SeedScore platform is built to run these predictions at the scale commercial breeding programmes actually operate at, flagging candidates suited to hotter, drier conditions and figuring out which varieties stay stable across different growing environments.
The timing argument is the interesting part. Breeding cycles are long, and Computomics points out that a crop variety hitting the market today may have been selected years earlier, under climate conditions that no longer match what's happening now. CEO and co-founder Dr Sebastian J. Schultheiss put it bluntly: breeders haven't lacked ambition on climate resilience, they've lacked a way to see problems coming before the field shows them, and that visibility gap costs time nobody has to spare.
Computomics isn't a one-product shop. Alongside ×SeedScore, the company's portfolio includes CropCompass and BreedScope for climate-smart breeding work, Pantograph for trait discovery and omics analysis, and MORPHEUS and MEGAN7 for microbiome analysis. Its customer base spans field crops, forage crops, vegetables and specialty crops.
With the fresh capital, the plan is straightforward: get the platform into more commercial breeding programmes. No flashy pivot, no new market claimed — just scaling what's already built, at a moment when European growing conditions are shifting faster than traditional breeding timelines can comfortably track.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Climate adaptation in agriculture rarely gets the attention it deserves because it's slow and unglamorous compared to splashy consumer AI news, but this is exactly where machine learning should be earning its keep. A €6.3 million round is modest by tech standards, yet if it shaves real years off breeding cycles for crops facing hotter, drier futures, that's a far better use of
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