OlsAro secures €5M to scale AI genetics for climate-resilient crops

OlsAro has pulled in €5 million in seed funding to move its salt-tolerant wheat closer to sale. Industrifonden led the round, Nordic Foodtech VC co-led it, and existing backers Future Food Fund, AgFunder, GU Ventures and PINC also joined. The Gothenburg startup says its total funding is now about €7.5 million.

This is not a general science grant. The money is meant to pay for international field trials, commercial work with seed-company partners, more R&D, AI-driven trait discovery and a bigger intellectual property portfolio. OlsAro also plans to start programmes on drought tolerance and nitrogen-use efficiency, and it says it wants to move into other cereals, including rice.

The company’s first product has been on the table for a while. OlsAro has described salt-tolerant wheat as its first product since at least April 2024, when it raised €2.5 million in what it then called a seed round and now labels pre-seed. Since then, it has been talking less like a lab project and more like a platform. SeedAX, its system, combines genetics, data, AI-driven trait discovery and genetic technologies to find climate-resilience traits, then folds them into elite germplasm for seed companies to commercialise.

Bangladesh is the headline proof point. OlsAro says its wheat yielded up to 41% more than a moderately salt-tolerant variety under saline conditions there, and the variety is being field-tested in several international markets. One partner, DCM Shriram, ran its own trials in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the 2024-25 winter season and said in July 2025 that the results were encouraging and deserved another season of testing.

The company is also trying to avoid the heavy machinery of building a big seed business on its own. In Bangladesh, it licenses commercial rights to Lal Teer Seed, which handles multiplication, logistics, storage, marketing and sales. OlsAro says it is aiming for that market by 2027. This round, then, is really a test of whether the company can turn one hard-won crop into a repeatable system before the weather and the timeline run out of patience.