OlsAro €5M seed funding to scale climate-resilient cereal genetics
Startups Magazine Startups Editorial
OlsAro raised €5M to push its climate-resilient wheat toward market. The Swedish startup says its salt-tolerant wheat can lift yields by up to 41% in saline fields.
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OlsAro has raised €5 million in seed funding to move its climate-resilient cereal genetics work from promise to product. The Swedish AgTech company wants to use the cash to advance its SeedAX platform and get its first salinity-resilient wheat out into the world.
Industrifonden led the round, with Nordic Foodtech VC joining as co-lead. Future Food Fund, PINC, AgFunder and GU Ventures all came back in as existing backers. The new money follows a €2.5 million pre-seed round in April 2024, taking OlsAro’s total funding to about €7.5 million.
The problem it is trying to tackle is a nasty one. Salinity affects around a tenth of the world’s cropland, while heat and drought are also squeezing cereal yields. OlsAro’s starting point is wheat, and its salinity-resilient version has already shown an increase of up to 41% in yield versus a moderately salt-tolerant variety under saline conditions in Bangladesh.
SeedAX sits at the centre of the pitch. The platform combines proprietary genetics and data, AI-driven trait discovery and genetic technologies to find climate-resilience traits, validate them and fold them into elite germplasm for commercial seed programmes. The wheat is now being field-trialled in several global markets, and the new funding is meant to support those trials, commercial work with seed-company partners, more R&D, more AI-led trait discovery and a wider IP portfolio. OlsAro also plans to broaden the pipeline into drought tolerance, nitrogen-use efficiency and other cereal crops, including rice.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the sort of ag biotech story that actually deserves the money: a narrow problem, a clear crop, and a claim with a field result behind it. Europe loves a climate-resilience deck; far fewer teams can point to a number like 41% and then get on with the unglamorous work of trials, IP and seed partners.
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