Biographica, a London-based agricultural biotechnology company, has secured £7 million in new funding to accelerate the global rollout of its AI-powered crop design platform.
The round was led by Faber VC, with participation from SuperSeed, Cardumen Capital, The Helm, EQT Foundation, and Sie Ventures. Existing backers including Chalfen Ventures, Entrepreneurs First, Nucleus Capital, Dhyan Ventures, Saras Capital, and Ventures Together also reinvested.
Tackling the slow pace of crop innovation
Bringing new crop traits such as drought resilience, disease resistance, or improved nutritional profiles to market often takes more than ten years and requires significant capital. One of the biggest constraints in this process is identifying which genes to target, a step that remains slow, costly, and highly uncertain.
Biographica addresses this bottleneck by applying machine learning to biological data, allowing researchers to pinpoint promising genetic targets in a matter of weeks rather than years. These insights guide both gene editing and advanced breeding strategies, with the potential to shorten development cycles by up to five years while significantly reducing R&D costs.
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Faster discovery through AI and experimentation
In early collaborations with seed producers and precision breeding companies, Biographica’s platform identified validated gene targets up to twelve times faster than conventional discovery approaches. In several cases, the system also surfaced novel targets that had not been detected using traditional methods.
The company is now extending this capability through a lab-in-the-loop model, combining AI-led discovery with rapid experimental validation. This closed feedback loop enables continuous learning, improving prediction accuracy and accelerating the creation of new crop traits with each iteration.
According to CEO Cecily Price, the approach mirrors advances seen in pharmaceutical research, where AI has transformed trial-and-error pipelines into adaptive biological systems. Biographica is applying the same principles to agriculture to bring greater speed and precision to crop development.
Industry partnerships and next steps
Alongside the funding announcement, Biographica revealed a new collaboration with BASF Nunhems aimed at speeding up the development of improved crop varieties.
The newly raised capital will be used to expand Biographica’s AI and data infrastructure, develop additional crop traits, and deepen partnerships across the global seed and breeding ecosystem. The company plans to scale its platform to support a wider range of crops and growing conditions as demand for climate-resilient agriculture continues to rise.
About Biographica
Biographica builds machine-learning-driven tools for the precision design of next-generation seed genetics. By accelerating the discovery of high-impact crop traits, the company aims to support more productive, nutritious, and climate-resilient agriculture, helping food systems adapt to global population growth and environmental change.
