- Aardaia, a Wageningen-based startup developing a nitrogen-fixing protein tuber, has raised an oversubscribed €5 million seed round led by Point Nine.
- The oversubscribed round came together just six months after Aardaia’s pre-seed, following strong early field results.
- The startup has grown to 14 people across 10 nationalities since its pre-seed, with half the team holding PhDs.
Aardaia, a Wageningen startup breeding a new protein-rich crop, has raised a €5 million seed round led by Point Nine. The company is working to domesticate the aardaker, a wild tuber it hopes can reduce Europe’s reliance on imported protein.
The round, which included Astanor, Grey Silo Ventures, and returning investor FoodLabs, and a group of angels, follows an earlier pre-seed backed by FoodLabs and, according to PitchBook, Wageningen-based accelerator StartLife, together raising roughly €770,000 before this round.
Pádraic Flood, co-founder and CEO of Aardaia, says the round was oversubscribed and came together fast: the company closed its pre-seed, saw strong early results, and decided six months later it was time to raise again.
A crop nobody thought to farm
Aardaia wants to domesticate the aardaker (Lathyrus tuberosus), a wild tuber found from the Netherlands to central Siberia. People have eaten it for centuries, but it has never been farmed on a large scale.
Flood, who trained as a botanist in Wageningen and was crop genetics lead at Infarm, co-founded Aardaia with Mike Henske, who has worked in agribusiness at Indigo and Solynta in 2023.
Its main idea is that aardaker offers the yield of a tuber and the nitrogen-fixing ability of a legume, so it does not need synthetic fertiliser. If it reaches its full potential, it could produce more protein per hectare than any crop today, though this has not happened yet.
The company uses large-scale genomic sequencing and phenotyping, not gene editing or genetic modification, to pick the best wild genetics. In 2026, Aardaia plans to screen 750,000 aardaker genotypes, and two million in 2027.
Aardaia is not the only company working on Europe’s legume shortage, but its approach is different. Flood mentions Terviva, which sells oilseed Pongamia trees, and CoverCress, which develops a new oilseed crop, as the closest examples, though both focus on just one species.
“We want to be the company that starts with the aardaker and then expands to many other species Aardaia is already testing other possible crops,” Flood tells TFN.
Why a SaaS investor backs on a tuber
For almost 20 years, Point Nine has mainly invested in B2B SaaS and marketplace companies such as Attio, Revolut, and Zendesk, typically investing €0.5 to €3 million in software, not plant breeding.
Partner Christoph Janz admits this is a change: “At Point Nine we invest mainly in software and AI, so a plant-breeding company wasn’t an obvious fit. But after my first call with Pádraic and Mike I was hooked! Humans have barely created a new crop in thousands of years because it was impossibly slow. Aardaia compresses that into years, combining old-fashioned breeding with modern genomics and AI.”
Flood says the fit comes down to scalability, which is often hard for agtech startups. Unlike vertical farming and other expensive models that need new infrastructure, aardaker can be grown with equipment farmers already have.
The rest of the round looks like a typical agrifood investment group.
Astanor, a European impact investor with about 50 companies in the food sector, described the investment as something for the ages. “We believe Pádraic is a true visionary who could be the Norman Borlaug of this generation,” says partner Harry Briggs, referring to the agronomist known for the Green Revolution.
Grey Silo Ventures, the venture arm of Italian ingredients group Cereal Docks, focused on supply-chain access.“We are eager to support them, leveraging Cereal Docks’ access to farmland and key stakeholders needed to build a new supply chain,” notes Matteo Leonardi, investment manager.
“Crop improvement has stagnated, with research efforts concentrated into only a handful of plants that we’ve focused on for thousands of years. Aardaia breaks free from this paradigm,” adds Darius Zarrabian, investment manager at FoodLabs, which backed the pre-seed round.
The market Aardaia is chasing
Europe still relies heavily on imported soy for animal feed. The global plant-based protein market was worth about $14.2 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach $20.5 billion by 2029 — part of a wider agrifoodtech funding trend that saw global agrifoodtech funding hold steady at $16.2 billion in 2025, with investors backing fewer companies but writing larger checks. The gap between demand and local supply is the opportunity investors see.
Right now, Aardaia sells to only one buyer: a Michelin-starred restaurant in Nijmegen that uses its extra R&D crops to make various products. To grow, the company faces a classic problem: farmers do not want to grow a crop without a market, and a market cannot form until farmers grow it. For now, Aardaia handles the farming itself.
Flood says the team now has 14 people from 10 countries, up from the 12 listed in the company’s press materials for this round. Half of the team has PhDs.
The new funding will support hiring and aims to position the company for market readiness within two years, ahead of a planned Series A. Flood says most of the biological challenges have been solved.
“Breeding in many ways is a solved problem. The remaining challenges are creating demand, getting market access, and finding a clear regulatory path,” he concludes.
Aardaia has support from a SaaS investor, three agrifood funds, and a Michelin-starred restaurant for its idea that a centuries-old tuber can help meet Europe’s protein needs. Still, the company has not shown at what price farmers would be willing to grow it.
