Biographica raises £7M for AI-driven crop design and expands partnerships across global seed industry

London, UK – January 7, 2025 – Biographica, a London-based AI startup redefining how the agricultural industry develops new crop varieties, today announced a £7 million funding round led by Faber VC.

The investment will accelerate the creation of climate-resilient, productive and nutritious crops – addressing urgent global food security challenges driven by climate change, population growth, and limited natural resources. Biographica also announced a new partnership with BASF | Nunhems, one of the world’s leading seed companies.

Today, developing a new crop trait such as drought tolerance, disease resistance, or improved nutrition typically takes more than a decade and costs millions of dollars. The most significant and costly bottleneck is knowing which genes control key crop traits – knowledge that informs gene editing and breeding programmes.

Biographica’s proprietary AI platform solves this by pinpointing the most promising genetic targets within weeks – defining what to change, how, and why, to generate precise trait improvements – cutting crop development timelines by up to five years and reducing R&D costs by millions.

In pilots with leading seed and precision breeding companies, Biographica’s AI platform identified proven gene targets 12x faster than traditional methods. Beyond speed, it can uncover novel targets that traditional methods miss, enabling entirely new, high-value traits to reach the market.

The company is now combining its AI-driven discovery with rapid experimental validation to create a “lab-in-the-loop” model – a proven self-improving cycle currently used in drug discovery that gives partners an increasingly rapid and reliable path to trait innovation.

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