Aardaia, a Wageningen-based startup turning wild plants into new crops, today announced a €5 million Seed round to expand its breeding platform and accelerate the development of its flagship, the aardaker, a protein-rich tuber that opens a new crop category. The round was led by Point Nine, with participation from
Rahul Raj
Aardaia, a Wageningen-based startup turning wild plants into new crops, today announced a €5 million Seed round to expand its breeding platform and accelerate the development of its flagship, the aardaker, a protein-rich tuber that opens a new crop category.
The round was led by Point Nine, with participation from new investors Astanor and Grey Silo, as well as returning investor FoodLabs, which led the company’s pre-Seed round. A group of angel investors also backed this 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 Flood and Mike Henske (COO), Aardaia invents new crops from first principles. Rather than re-engineering existing commodity crops, it identifies wild plant species already hardwired with desirable traits and breeds them into viable crops, with no genetic modification.
Aardaia states that the crops essential to the world were initially chosen during the Stone Age, and the portfolio has scarcely changed since, despite significant shifts in climate, diet, and biological tools.
It further notes that globally, approximately 95% of calories are derived from just thirty species, despite the existence of over 400,000 plant species on Earth, the vast majority of which have never been domesticated for food or other purposes.
The company Aardaia believes it is time to draw on what evolution has already produced: 400 million years of plant life on land, more than 160 trillion species-years of refinement, ready to be turned into the crops a changing world needs.
“The few crops we rely on are increasingly stressed by a changing climate. For Europe and much of the world, the problem is also one of sovereignty: the continent grows much of its own food yet imports most of its protein, which is costly, carbon-heavy and exposed to geopolitics. A protein crop Europe could grow for itself would change that,” the startup mentioned in the press release.
Aardaia claims that the answer is the aardaker (Lathyrus tuberosus), a new category of crop, a protein-rich tuber, in essence a protein-rich potato. It pairs the productivity of a root crop with the nitrogen-fixing biology of a legume. It emphasises that it requires no synthetic nitrogen fertiliser and has the potential to produce up to five times more protein per hectare than any current crop, which is a target Aardaia is working toward. The company describes aardaker as a true “protein potato”.
The Dutch startup claims to take a different approach than the industry. It states that while most of the industry re-engineers the handful of species the world already farms, Aardaia draws on wild plants that have already evolved the traits a new crop needs and breeds them into reality, without the need for any genetic modification and no gene editing.
The company builds large genomic datasets and uses whole-genome sequencing combined with in-depth phenotyping to predict in silico which genetics will perform before a seed goes in the ground.
This year alone, Aardaia reported that it is screening three-quarters of a million unique aardaker genotypes, and with the new funding, it aims to push toward two million next year.
“At Point Nine we invest mainly in software and AI, so a plant-breeding company wasn’t an obvious fit. But after my first call with Pádraic and Mike, I was hooked! Humans have barely created a new crop in thousands of years because it was impossibly slow. Aardaia compresses that into years, combining old-fashioned breeding with modern genomics and AI. I couldn’t be more thrilled to work with the team on their mission to make our food system more resilient, one new crop at a time,” Christoph Janz, Partner, Point 9.
The team consists of twelve members representing ten nationalities, with half holding doctorates. Their expertise includes plant breeding, agronomy, crop physiology, phytopathology, computational biology, and AI. The company is still hiring.
