Moa Technology (Moa), an Oxford-based agricultural BioTech company tackling weed resistance to herbicides, has raised a €25.9 million (£22.2 million) Series C financing round. The round was co-led by Oxford Science Enterprises and Supernova Invest. New investors in Moa are Agri Investment Fund; GrainInnovate, a fund investing on behalf of
Rahul Raj
Moa Technology (Moa), an Oxford-based agricultural BioTech company tackling weed resistance to herbicides, has raised a €25.9 million (£22.2 million) Series C financing round.
The round was co-led by Oxford Science Enterprises and Supernova Invest. New investors in Moa are Agri Investment Fund; GrainInnovate, a fund investing on behalf of the Grain Research Development Corporation and managed by Artesian; Infinity Investment Partners; and Magdalen College, Oxford. The round was also supported by existing investors OSE, Lansdowne Partners, Parkwalk, and Oxford University Innovation.
Dr. Virginia Corless, CEO of Moa Technology, said, “This marks a major milestone for Moa Technology – a validation of the outstanding progress we have made not just in the laboratory, but also in striking commercial deals with leading industry partners around the world. We are particularly pleased that, through AIF in Europe and GrainInnovate in Australia, the farming sector itself is closely connected to the next phase of Moa’s development, helping accelerate delivery of our solutions to the fields where they are so urgently needed.”
Founded in 2017 by Professor Liam Dolan and Dr. Clément Champion, Moa spun out of Oxford University that same year. The company is working on reinventing the way that synthetic and biological herbicides capable of breaking weed resistance are discovered.
Moa claims that its approach involves combining its own IP and scientific platforms and huge amounts of proprietary data, powered by AI and machine learning, to find new ways to control weeds faster, more accurately and more reliably.
The company states that using very special miniaturised plants, its proprietary discovery platforms are finding potential new modes of action at “unprecedented scale, speed and cost”. It is working to develop both synthetic and bio-herbicidal solutions.
Explaining what a mode of action is and why it’s important, Moa states, “A mode of action (sometimes shortened to MoA) means a way of working. A herbicide with a new – or ‘novel’ – mode of action will work in a very different way to any other herbicides, causing fundamentally different changes in the way the plant behaves, right down to the cellular level.”
It further emphasises that when a small number of modes of action are used repeatedly, as has been the case in the agricultural industry for the last half century, weeds adapt and develop resistance to them, similar to antibiotic resistance.
The company claims that with its proprietary discovery platforms, it has already discovered over 80 novel mode of action areas, which work in completely different ways to control weeds and break resistance. It reported that after successful validation in the lab and glasshouse, Moa’s most advanced novel mode of action programmes are performing strongly to control some of the world’s toughest weeds in successive seasons of international field trials.
In 2025, the company discovered a new category of products – Moa Amplifiers™ – which are not herbicidal on their own but have the potential to reduce the amount or concentration of herbicides required.
Moa also reported that in the last 24 months, it has formed R&D collaborations with four leading companies – Nufarm, Gowan, Certis Belchim and Corteva Agriscience – to develop different novel solutions to help farmers protect their harvests from crop-killing weeds, and expects to continue to sign further commercial research partnerships. The company secured a €7 million Series A round in 2019.
Martin Fiennes of Oxford Science Enterprises said, “When we helped spin Moa out from the University of Oxford’s Plant Sciences Department in 2017, we saw that its technology platform had a unique and important approach to address the market’s need for herbicides capable of breaking weed resistance. The success of the platform’s discoveries since in the lab and field trials has confirmed Moa is on track to provide the new solutions farmers need to sustain agricultural productivity, and we’re delighted to be supporting the company again in this fundraising round.”
The company plans to use this capital to bring its three most advanced programmes significantly closer to commercialisation, build its pipeline of early-stage novel mode of action herbicides and to further develop the Moa Amplifiers programme. The new equity investment will be supplemented by upfront and milestone payments from current and future industry partners working with Moa.
