OlsAro raises €5m seed round as salt-tolerant wheat nears market

OlsAro, a Swedish startup developing salt-tolerant wheat and other crops that cope with environmental stress, has raised a €5 million ($5.5 million) seed round to build out its SeedAX platform ahead of a commercial launch in 2027. Industrifonden and Nordic Foodtech VC co-led the round, with Future Food Fund, PINC, AgFunder and GU Ventures also taking part. Total funding now stands at €7.5 million ($8.3 million). AgFunder, the parent company of the publication that reported the story, is an investor. The money will go toward commercial work, new programs on drought tolerance and nitrogen-use efficiency, and expansion into other cereals such as rice.

Salinity affects around a tenth of the world's cropland, and heat and drought are adding pressure on cereal production. CEO Elén Faxö says salt-tolerant rice has received a fair amount of research, but wheat has few options. OlsAro's first product, a salinity-resilient wheat, showed a yield increase of up to 41% over a moderately salt-tolerant variety under saline conditions in Bangladesh. The company is working with Lal Teer Seed, Bangladesh's largest private biotech and seed company, toward a 2027 launch there. About one million hectares in Bangladesh are salt-affected.

Advanced trials are running in Kenya and Pakistan, and further salt- and heat-tolerance trials are planned in Egypt, Italy, Canada and Australia. In India, DCM Shriram has tested OlsAro lines in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar; India has close to seven million hectares of salt-affected soil. The varieties are designed to outperform conventional wheat at 4 to 10 dS/m of salinity.

OlsAro uses two development routes depending on each market's regulations. One is a population-based approach using EMS mutagenesis, which creates genetic diversity and is non-GM, so it can enter any market. The other is gene editing. AI screens genetic variations (SNPs) linked to target traits, drawing on proprietary and open-source data, including genomic, field and transcriptomic data. The company aims to turn this into a platform seed companies can use repeatedly.