Agritech Startup Aardaia Raises €5 Mn in Seed Round led by Point Nine

The round also attracted new investors, including Astanor, Grey Silo, and a group of angel investors. Aardaia is developing new crop varieties from wild plants to help improve agriculture and food production.

Read Also- Cybersecurity Startup 8Layers Raises €2.5 Mn in Pre-Seed Round

"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.

Founded in 2025 by Pádraic Flood and Mike Henske, Aardaia is building a plant breeding platform that finds useful wild plant species and turns them into new crops. It does this without using genetic modification (GM) or gene editing.

The company uses whole-genome sequencing, computational biology, and plant analysis (phenotyping) to predict how plants will perform. This helps speed up the breeding process and develop better crop varieties more efficiently.

Aardaia's first product is the aardaker, a protein-rich root crop. It is designed to combine the high productivity of root crops with the natural nitrogen-fixing ability of legumes.

According to the company, the aardaker can help reduce the need for imported protein crops. It also grows without requiring synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, making it a more sustainable option for agriculture.

The new funding will help Aardaia expand its plant breeding platform and speed up the development of its first crop, the aardaker. The company will also continue developing new crop varieties from wild plant species.