Cecily Price – Co-founder & CEO & Dominic Hall, PhD – Co-founder & CTO of Biographica
Biographica, an AI startup based at our Rothamsted Campus, is redefining how the agricultural industry develops new crop varieties. Today, the company announced a £7 million funding round led by Faber VC. The investment will accelerate the creation of climate-resilient, productive and nutritious crops, addressing urgent global food security challenges driven by climate change, population growth and limited natural resources. Biographica also announced a new partnership with BASF | Nunhems, one of the world’s leading seed companies.
Today, developing a new crop trait such as drought tolerance, disease resistance, or improved nutrition typically takes more than a decade and costs millions of dollars. The most significant and costly bottleneck is knowing which genes control key crop traits – knowledge that informs gene editing and breeding programmes. Biographica’s proprietary AI platform solves this by pinpointing the most promising genetic targets within weeks – defining what to change, how, and why, to generate precise trait improvements – cutting crop development timelines by up to five years and reducing R&D costs by millions.
In pilots with leading seed and precision breeding companies, Biographica’s AI platform identified proven gene targets 12x faster than traditional methods. Beyond speed, it can uncover novel targets that traditional methods miss, enabling entirely new, high-value traits to reach the market.
The company is now combining its AI-driven discovery with rapid experimental validation to create a “lab-in-the-loop” model – a proven self-improving cycle currently used in drug discovery that gives partners an increasingly rapid and reliable path to trait innovation.
“We’ve seen AI reshape pharma, turning trial-and-error pipelines into learnable biological systems – and it works. We’re bringing that same discipline to crops,” said Cecily Price, CEO of Biographica. “Our partnerships with BASF | Nunhems and other leading seed companies show the industry is ready for AI-first approaches to trait discovery, to bring high-value crop varieties to market in seasons, not decades.”
Biographica has demonstrated that deep technical partnerships can scale – the technology can be deployed at speed across crops and traits, in both breeding and gene-editing pipelines. Early pilots have progressed into commercial agreements, with Biographica-identified targets already moving into testing pipelines.
The £7 million funding round was led by Faber VC with participation from new investors SuperSeed, Cardumen Capital, The Helm, EQT Foundation and Sie Ventures, and existing investors Chalfen Ventures, Entrepreneurs First, Saras Capital and Ventures Together, alongside a number of strategic angel investors. The funding will be used to expand Biographica’s proprietary data collection, extend its AI platform to new crop traits, and deepen commercial relationships across the seed industry.
“With climate change intensifying the pressure on agricultural systems, improving crop genetics is the most powerful lever we have to sustainably increase yields and build resilience,” said Sofia Santos, Partner at Faber VC. “Biographica is redefining how agricultural innovation happens, and this investment round will allow them to scale their impact globally.”
To get in touch, contact hello@graphica.bio.
