- OlsAro raised €5M in seed funding led by Industrifonden, with Nordic Foodtech VC as co-lead.
- It says its wheat out-yielded a moderately salt-tolerant variety by up to 41% in Bangladesh.
- The money readies its first wheat product for market and opens drought and nitrogen programmes.
OlsAro has described salt-tolerant wheat as its first product since at least April 2024.
The Swedish AgTech startup has now raised €5 million in seed funding to get that wheat to market, in a round led by Industrifonden with Nordic Foodtech VC as co-lead.
Existing investors Future Food Fund, AgFunder, GU Ventures, and PINC, Paulig’s venture arm, also took part. The Gothenburg company, a spinout from Lund University and the University of Gothenburg, puts its total funding at about €7.5 million. The round follows a €2.5 million round in April 2024 that OlsAro announced as a seed round and now describes as pre-seed.
The money will fund international field trials, commercial work with seed-company partners, more R&D and AI-driven trait discovery, and a larger intellectual property portfolio. New programmes will target drought tolerance and nitrogen-use efficiency, or how well a crop turns fertiliser into yield. OlsAro also plans to move into other cereals, including rice.
“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 seed companies can use repeatedly. By expanding SeedAX across more traits and markets, we can help our partners bring climate-resilient cereals to farmers faster and at much greater scale,” said Elén Faxö, CEO of OlsAro.
Seed companies are the customer
SeedAX, OlsAro’s platform, combines genetics and data, AI-driven trait discovery, and genetic technologies to find and validate climate-resilience traits. It then integrates them into elite germplasm, the high-performing breeding lines seed companies already grow, for commercial seed programmes.
Faxö told AgFunderNews in July 2025 that OlsAro will not build large operations of its own. In Bangladesh, she said, it licenses the right to commercialise its germplasm to a partner, Lal Teer Seed, which handles seed multiplication, logistics, storage, marketing, and sales. She said OlsAro aimed to reach that market by 2027 and that the wheat was in its second year of distinctness, uniformity, and stability testing, a standard check for new plant varieties. The latest release gives no launch date.
Industrifonden, which calls itself Sweden’s venture capital fund, manages more than 5 billion Swedish krona and backs companies from seed to Series A in deep tech, life science, and transformative tech. Nordic Foodtech VC has a team in Helsinki and Copenhagen and runs a €42 million fund launched in 2020 and a second fund launched in 2025. It makes initial investments of up to €2 million and focuses on research spinouts in the Nordic and Baltic countries, a description that fits OlsAro.
Both firms have also backed Gothenburg’s Melt&Marble, which raised a €7.3 million Series A in December 2025 led by Industrifonden. Among the existing investors, Future Food Fund is a Netherlands-based seed and Series A fund for Western European food and agriculture startups, and Paulig is a food group with about €1.39 billion in 2025 sales.
“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.
Tackling salinity, drought and food security
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that salt-affected soils cover 10.7% of the world’s land, or 1,381 million hectares. It also estimates that 10% of irrigated cropland and 10% of rainfed cropland are affected, though it says uncertainty remains high because data is limited.
OlsAro says its wheat produced up to 41% more than a moderately salt-tolerant variety under saline conditions in Bangladesh, and the variety is being field-tested in several international markets.
One partner has run its own trials. DCM Shriram, which AgFunderNews described as the largest player in proprietary wheat seed in India, tested three OlsAro lines at three saline sites in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the 2024-25 winter season. In July 2025, it said the results were encouraging and that it wanted to test for another season.
The race to engineer climate-resilient crops
OlsAro’s €5 million is small next to its closest comparisons.
Oxford spinout Wild Bioscience raised $60 million in a Series A in October 2025, led by the Ellison Institute of Technology. Tropic closed a €91.3 million Series C in March 2026 to scale gene-edited bananas and rice. Belgium’s Rainbow Crops received a $7 million Gates Foundation grant in March 2026 for heat- and drought-resilient corn, sorghum, and rice, then raised a €9.7 million seed round in June 2026 led by Italian venture capital firm LIFTT, with Corteva as a new investor.
Tropic and Rainbow Crops rely on gene editing. Faxö told AgFunderNews that OlsAro has two routes: gene editing, and a population approach that treats seeds with a substance to induce genetic diversity. She described the second as non-GM everywhere, meaning OlsAro can target any market without the wheat being classed as genetically modified.
The clearest test is the Bangladesh target Faxö gave AgFunderNews in July 2025: reaching the market by 2027. If it holds, this round bought a product. If it slips, the money will have funded more trials of a wheat OlsAro has called its first product since April 2024.
