Aardaia, a Wageningen-based agritech startup developing new crop varieties from wild plants, has raised €5 million in a seed funding round led by Point Nine. Existing investor FoodLabs participated in the round alongside new investors Astanor, Grey Silo and a group of angel investors.
Founded in 2025 by Pádraic Flood and Mike Henske, Aardaia is developing a breeding platform that identifies and domesticates wild plant species to create new crops without using genetic modification or gene editing. The company combines whole-genome sequencing, computational biology and phenotyping to predict plant performance and accelerate breeding programmes.
Its first product is the aardaker, a protein-rich tuber designed to combine the productivity of a root crop with the nitrogen-fixing properties of legumes. According to the company, the crop is intended to reduce reliance on imported protein crops while requiring no synthetic nitrogen fertiliser.
Aardaia says its breeding platform enables it to evaluate large numbers of plant genotypes in a shorter timeframe than conventional breeding methods. The company expects to screen around 750,000 unique aardaker genotypes this year and aims to increase that to around two million with the new funding.
For most of history, inventing a new crop took millennia, so the world settled for improving the few it already had. We can now design crops on demand, drawing on hundreds of millions of years of evolution to find plants that are already built to win. The aardaker is our first, and this round lets us put our foot on the accelerator,
said Pádraic Flood, co-founder and CEO of Aardaia.
The new funding will be used to expand Aardaia's breeding platform and accelerate the development of the aardaker as the company continues to build new crop varieties from wild plant species.
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