OlsAro has raised a €5 million ($5.5 million) seed round to develop its SeedAX platform and accelerate commercial work as it prepares for a commercial launch in 2027. The round was co-led by Industrifonden and Nordic Foodtech VC and supported by Future Food Fund, PINC, AgFunder and GU Ventures, bringing the company’s cumulative funding to €7.5 million ($8.3 million).
“What convinced us about OlsAro was the scientific work behind the company, together with its field-trial results and existing seed-company partnerships. With SeedAX, OlsAro has the opportunity to turn this into a scalable platform for seed companies looking to develop climate-resilient varieties across multiple traits and markets,” said Sara Frykstrand Ångström, investment manager and head of intelligence at Industrifonden.
Salt-tolerant wheat trials and markets
OlsAro, a Swedish startup developing salt-tolerant wheat and other crops resilient to environmental stressors, says the new funding will also support new programs on drought tolerance and nitrogen-use efficiency and moves into other cereals such as rice.
“We’re seeing a steady reduction in the amount of cultivatable land due to soil salinity, which can mean lower yields or at worst no growth at all. This higher salinity is in part due to flooding and cyclones, but also due to the lack of freshwater, where farmers have been irrigating with saline water or brackish water, so it’s a huge addressable market,” said CEO Elén Faxö.
OlsAro’s first product, a salinity-resilient wheat, has shown up to a 41% yield increase over a moderately salt-tolerant variety under saline conditions in Bangladesh and is being trialed in multiple markets, Faxö told AgFunderNews. “Bangladesh remains one of our lead markets, and we’re working with Lal Teer Seed [the largest private biotech and seed company in Bangladesh] towards a commercial launch in 2027. Around one million hectares in Bangladesh are affected by salinity, while demand for locally grown wheat keeps rising, so the need is clear.”
The company said its salt-tolerant wheat is in advanced trials in Kenya and Pakistan, and that additional field trials for salt and heat tolerance are underway in Egypt, Italy, Canada and Australia. Because the commercial varieties are developed without genetic modification, OlsAro says it can enter those markets without GM regulation hurdles.
In India, OlsAro has collaborated with partners including DCM Shriram, which has conducted trials of OlsAro salt-tolerant wheat lines in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. “India is a market with significant potential for us, where we have ongoing collaborations, including field trials of our climate-resilient wheat,” Faxö said. “With close to seven million hectares of salt-affected soils and rising heat stress, the need for more resilient wheat in India is growing.”
OlsAro’s varieties are designed to outperform conventional wheat at 4–8 deciSiemens per metre (dS/m) and up to 10 dS/m, a range the company says covers moderately to strongly saline soils where conventional wheat loses significant yield.
SeedAX, development paths and AI
Faxö described two development paths that OlsAro can deploy depending on regulatory landscapes. The first is a population-based approach using EMS mutagenesis: “we treat the seeds with a specific substance to introduce very high genetic diversity. We can then commercialize varieties with desired traits from screening in our populations. The advantage is that it’s non-GM globally, so we can target any market without being considered GM.”
The second path uses gene editing. “For trait discovery, we use AI to screen down on the SNPs [single nucleotide polymorphisms or genetic variations] of interest for our target traits, then the next step is to go for integrating the trait via gene editing or our population-based approach in local elite varieties. The strength of our AI is that we have plenty of proprietary data that we can feed the AI system with, in addition to open-source data.”
Faxö said the company underpins its work with “a database of genomic data, field data, transcriptomics and so on. And then we also have AI that enables us to speed development that we are continuously building on.” She added that the population-based approach combines phenotypic and genotypic screening: “When we speak about a population-based approach, it’s both forward and reverse, which means that we both do phenotypic screening (looking at the physical traits or characteristics of a plant) from within the populations to find the variety or the line of interest with a certain trait. We also do genotypic screening (looking at the DNA of the plant) based on AI-derived traits we have identified from within the population for variety development.”
On the company’s strategic aim, Faxö said: “We have spent years proving that we can identify and develop genetics that perform under some of the conditions putting the greatest pressure on agriculture. This round is about turning that capability into a platform that seed companies can use repeatedly.”
