German agritech company Computomics has raised €6.3 million in Series B funding to scale the commercial deployment of its climate-smart breeding platform. The round was led by Convent Capital Agri Food Fund, which invested €5 million, with participation from existing investors High-Tech Gründerfonds, MBG Baden-Württemberg and Amathaon Capital, alongside the company's founders and scientific advisers. The financing also benefits from support from the European Union under the InvestEU Fund.
Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Tübingen, Computomics applies machine learning and genomic analysis to plant breeding, helping breeders predict how different crop varieties are likely to perform under specific environmental conditions.
The company's technology combines genomic data with information on temperature, rainfall and soil conditions, as well as measurements from field trials. Its machine learning models use these datasets to predict how a particular genotype will perform in a given environment, helping breeders assess potential crop varieties earlier in the breeding process.
Computomics' ×SeedScore platform applies these predictions at the scale of commercial breeding programmes. It is designed to help breeders identify candidates likely to perform under hotter and drier conditions, determine which varieties are stable across different environments and assess where particular varieties are best suited for cultivation. The company works with commercial breeders across field crops, forage crops, vegetables and specialty crops.
The technology is aimed at increasingly challenging growing conditions across Europe, where lengthy breeding cycles mean varieties entering the market today may have been selected under different climatic conditions several years earlier.
Breeders have never lacked ambition about climate resilience. What they have lacked is a way to see it before the field tells them, which takes years they no longer have,
said Dr Sebastian J. Schultheiss, co-founder and CEO of Computomics.
Computomics' portfolio also includes CropCompass and BreedScope for climate-smart breeding, Pantograph for omics data analysis and trait discovery, and MORPHEUS and MEGAN7 for microbiome analysis.
The funding will support the expansion of the platform across more commercial breeding programmes.
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