Computomics raises €6.3M to scale climate-smart plant breeding

German
agritech company Computomics has raised €6.3 million in Series B funding to
scale the commercial deployment of its climate-smart breeding platform. The
round was led by Convent Capital Agri Food Fund, which invested €5 million,
with participation from existing investors High-Tech Gründerfonds, MBG Baden-Württemberg and Amathaon Capital, alongside the company’s founders and
scientific advisers. The financing also benefits from support from the European
Union under the InvestEU Fund.

Founded in
2012 and headquartered in Tübingen, Computomics applies machine learning and
genomic analysis to plant breeding, helping breeders predict how different crop
varieties are likely to perform under specific environmental conditions.

The company’s
technology combines genomic data with information on temperature, rainfall and
soil conditions, as well as measurements from field trials. Its machine
learning models use these datasets to predict how a particular genotype will
perform in a given environment, helping breeders assess potential crop
varieties earlier in the breeding process.

Computomics’
×SeedScore platform applies these predictions at the scale of commercial
breeding programmes. It is designed to help breeders identify candidates likely
to perform under hotter and drier conditions, determine which varieties are
stable across different environments and assess where particular varieties are
best suited for cultivation. The company works with commercial breeders across
field crops, forage crops, vegetables and specialty crops.

The
technology is aimed at increasingly challenging growing conditions across
Europe, where lengthy breeding cycles mean varieties entering the market today
may have been selected under different climatic conditions several years
earlier.

Breeders
have never lacked ambition about climate resilience. What they have lacked is a
way to see it before the field tells them, which takes years they no longer
have,

said Dr Sebastian J. Schultheiss, co-founder and CEO of Computomics.

Computomics’
portfolio also includes CropCompass and BreedScope for climate-smart breeding,
Pantograph for omics data analysis and trait discovery, and MORPHEUS and MEGAN7
for microbiome analysis.

The funding
will support the expansion of the platform across more commercial breeding
programmes.