€5m · Seed · Agritech · Gothenburg, Sweden
Gothenburg-based OlsAro has raised €5m in Seed funding to develop its SeedAX crop-genetics platform and bring its first salinity-resilient wheat product towards market. Industrifonden led the round, Nordic Foodtech VC joined as co-lead, and existing investors Future Food Fund, PINC, AgFunder and GU Ventures participated. The company says the capital will support international field trials, commercial work with seed-company partners, further R&D, AI-driven trait discovery and an expanded IP portfolio.
Turning crop traits into a repeatable seed-company platform
OlsAro develops climate-resilience traits for cereals rather than building a new consumer seed brand. SeedAX combines proprietary genetics and data, AI-driven trait discovery and genetic technologies to identify and validate useful traits, then integrate them into elite germplasm for commercial seed programmes. Its initial focus is wheat exposed to salinity, heat and drought.
That partnership model can let OlsAro work through seed companies that already have locally adapted varieties, breeding programmes and routes to farmers. The commercial test is whether a trait that performs in OlsAro's trials can be transferred into partner germplasm without losing yield or other qualities that determine adoption. Repeatable results across several traits and geographies would make SeedAX more than a one-product wheat project; inconsistent field performance would keep each partnership bespoke and slow.
OlsAro reports that its salinity-resilient wheat produced up to 41% more yield than a moderately salt-tolerant variety under saline conditions in Bangladesh. The company says the wheat is now in field trials across several global markets. The round therefore finances both scientific work and commercial evidence: partners need multi-location data before they can commit breeding capacity and market access to a new trait.
Expanding beyond salinity
The financing follows a €2.5m pre-seed round announced in April 2024 and brings OlsAro's total disclosed funding to about €7.5m. The company is rooted in more than a decade of research from the University of Gothenburg and Lund University, with co-founders Henrik Aronsson and Olof Olsson contributing plant-molecular-biology and crop-genetics expertise.
OlsAro plans new programmes for drought tolerance and nitrogen-use efficiency, alongside its existing work on salinity and heat, and intends to extend the platform to other cereals including rice. Those additions widen the potential partner base, but they also raise the validation burden: each trait-crop-market combination must generate evidence strong enough for a seed company to carry it through breeding and commercialisation.
Sources checked:
GU Ventures press release · Industrifonden · OlsAro company background · OlsAro contact page · OlsAro 2024 financing announcement · Tech.eu Funding Explorer
Image: OlsAro, via GU Ventures.
