SugaROx lands £1 million boost to accelerate field testing biostimulant research

SugaROx has secured £1million in additional funding following its latest seed round extension.

£400,000 of the strategic investment has been secured from a global player in the fertiliser industry, The Mosaic Company, alongside continued backing from  existing  UK-based angel investors and sustainable growth-focused investment funds the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund (managed by Future Planet Capital) and Regenerate Ventures, who contributed a further £600,000.

Biostimulants are one of the fastest growing crop input sectors, with an estimated 11% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Our £1 million extension follows a recent £2.4 million grant awarded from the UK’s national innovation agency, Innovate UK, to upscale manufacturing of our first active ingredient Trehalose-6-Phosphate (T6P).

Our T6P biostimulant boosts the yields and resilience of crops by inhibiting SnRK1, an enzyme that signals energy scarcity in the plant. Safety tests were completed in early 2024, confirming a promising regulatory outlook for the proprietary T6P, and led potential go-to-market partners to request samples for field trials.

We are working to launch our T6P wheat biostimulant in the UK market in 2027 and in the EU in 2028. This year we launched trials in soybean and maize with a view to enter the US and Brazilian markets shortly after.

Explaining the benefits of Mosaic’s investment, Dr Cara Griffiths our CTO and co-founder, added: “With Mosaic we gain access to an established network of trial sites for validation of our first product in the US at scale. Mosaic will also provide us with access to TruResponse®, a digital platform to visualise field results, which will be extremely valuable for our research.”