Wild Bioscience (Wild Bio), an Oxford University AgTech spinout that designs improved crops for resilient agriculture, has acquired F1 Seed, a Suffolk-based independent wheat breeding business. With this acquisition, Wild Bio becomes a fully integrated, end-to-end UK seed company. The financial details were undisclosed. The deal follows Wild Bio’s €51
Rahul Raj 
Wild Bioscience (Wild Bio), an Oxford University AgTech spinout that designs improved crops for resilient agriculture, has acquired F1 Seed, a Suffolk-based independent wheat breeding business.
With this acquisition, Wild Bio becomes a fully integrated, end-to-end UK seed company. The financial details were undisclosed. The deal follows Wild Bio’s €51 million Series A investment, which was raised to expand its R&D and commercial operations and turn its early field successes into market-ready seed varieties. Oxfordshire-based Wild Bio has raised €65.8 million ($75 million) from The Ellison Institute of Technology, Oxford Science Enterprises, Braavos Capital, and the University of Oxford.
Dr. Ross Hendron, co-founder and CEO of Wild Bio, said, “Wheat is Britain’s biggest crop and feeds a fifth of humanity. But on a changing planet, growing it is only getting harder. That’s the challenge we exist to meet. As a new independent seed business that brings breeding and gene editing together, we can focus on the traits that growers genuinely need and design towards them with precision. Bill and his team have built something remarkable; pairing their strengths with our evolutionary platform gives us the full stack of capabilities we need to develop the varieties that will bend the yield curve upwards again.”
Founded in 2021 by Dr Hendron and Steve Kelly, Wild Bio is a plant science spinout from the University of Oxford that develops next-generation resilient crops for a food-secure future. The startup uses evolutionary biology, AI, and gene editing to design traits to drive higher-yielding, lower-carbon farming.
The company notes that it specialises in crop genetics and has developed a unique data-driven approach to improve crop productivity, climate resilience, and agricultural sustainability. “The Wild Bio platform deciphers hundreds of millions of years of plant evolution to identify promising genetic improvements from wild species. These evolutionary innovations are then used to guide precision breeding strategies for modern elite crop varieties,” the company mentions.
By building unique plant biology datasets and applying ML/AI tools to find signatures for how evolution has historically built better plants that can tackle challenging conditions such as drought, heat, and flooding. The Wild Bio platform precisely targets specific traits and activates them in key crops like wheat. This is done through precision breeding, which can produce changes that, in theory, could also be achieved through conventional breeding, but only over a prohibitively long period.
According to Wild Bio, the genetics underpinning Britain’s wheat, the country’s largest arable crop, which generates roughly three billion pounds in a typical year, have been dominated historically by the subsidiaries of foreign multinationals. Over decades, this has resulted in the UK’s wheat pool narrowing, leaving more than 50% of domestic wheat varieties vulnerable to yellow rust (a devastating fungal disease).
Founded by veteran wheat breeder Bill Angus in 2014, F1 Seed was specifically built to broaden genetic diversity and protect farmers from this kind of widespread crop failure. Meanwhile, Wild Bio is designing its traits and breeding new varieties here in the UK, for local growers, as an independent company.
“This is the most exciting news for wheat growers since Cambridge University established the Plant Breeding Institute in 1912. That organisation established the blueprint for integrating new traits into cereals. Now over a century later, armed with an array of novel traits, we are well placed to move wheat breeding into a new and exciting era. Deploying traits has been the lifeblood of wheat breeding – now we have the opportunity to accelerate this in UK germplasm,” said Angus.
F1 Seed reports it already has six wheat varieties on the UK market, mainly for animal feed and distilling, with three more set to launch this year. Of the 82 new wheat varieties entering the official UK national trials this year, 12% (10 entries) come directly from F1 Seed’s pipeline.
With this acquisition, F1 Seed Ltd brings decades of breeding experience and a diverse germplasm pipeline built over more than a decade, while Wild Bio brings evolutionary biology, gene editing, and AI-led trait discovery for precise genetic improvement. The integrated business can pursue traits more efficiently than either could on its own, across yield, stability, and disease resistance, and translate them into varieties to address the needs of local growers.
Dr. Stuart Harrison, Chief Business Officer at Wild Bio, said, “By acquiring F1 Seed, Wild Bioscience evolves from a trait discovery and licensing business to a full seed company. This gives Wild Bioscience all the capabilities of a larger seed company with the agility of a start-up, which is extremely rare in the seed industry and a clear differentiator from the incumbents. The UK is a perfect starting point as stagnating wheat yields and challenging agronomic conditions are the perfect target for the Wild Bioscience platform.”
