OlsAro, a startup in Gothenburg, Sweden, that develops wheat able to grow in salty soil, has closed a €5M seed round. Swedish venture capital investor Industrifonden led the deal, and Helsinki-based Nordic Foodtech VC came in as co-lead.
Existing backers Future Food Fund and agrifood tech investor AgFunder also joined, along with PINC, the venture arm of Finnish food group Paulig, and GU Ventures, the University of Gothenburg’s investment company. OlsAro says the money will pay for international field trials, commercial work with seed company partners, more research, trait discovery driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and a larger intellectual property (IP) portfolio.
The company also plans new programmes for drought tolerance and better nitrogen use, and wants to expand beyond wheat into other cereals, including rice. Chief executive Elén Faxö said OlsAro had spent years proving it could find and develop genetics that cope with harsh farming conditions, and that the round was about “turning that capability into a platform seed companies can use repeatedly”.
OlsAro calls that platform SeedAX. The company describes it as its own genetic material and data combined with AI tools that search for useful traits. Genetic technologies then check that those traits work before they are bred into the elite lines that seed companies use for their commercial seed.
The new money brings OlsAro’s total funding to about €7.5M, according to the company. Its previous round, €2.5M in April 2024, was led by Future Food Fund and PINC. OlsAro announced that deal as a seed round at the time but now describes it as pre-seed.
How OlsAro Breeds Its Wheat
OlsAro grew out of research at Lund University and the University of Gothenburg. The company is built on years of work by chief technology officer Henrik Aronsson and technical adviser Olof Olsson, and Aronsson said in 2024 that its platform drew on about a decade of research.
OlsAro’s commercial varieties come from a large population of wheat lines that each carry random genetic changes. The company creates these by treating seeds with a chemical called ethyl methanesulfonate, and in 2024 it said the collection held more than 2,000 lines. It then screens them for plants that do well in salty soil.
The approach resembles traditional breeding: the chemical speeds up the kind of random change that also happens in nature, and breeders pick out the useful results. Gene editing is different, because scientists change one chosen spot in a plant’s DNA on purpose. The European Union (EU) still regulates gene-edited crops under its rules for genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
Faxö said in 2025 that OlsAro uses gene editing mainly for technology development. The company also uses machine learning to sift through tiny differences in the genetic code between plants and flag those linked to salt tolerance, she said in 2024.
Faxö has called the platform “much faster than traditional breeding methods”, though the company’s own figures vary: its 2024 funding announcement said three times faster, while its website says development time is cut by half. OlsAro does not sell seed itself. It licenses its breeding material to seed companies, which handle multiplication, logistics and sales.
Bangladesh First, Then India
OlsAro’s first product is a salt-tolerant wheat aimed at Bangladesh, where Faxö said in 2025 that about one million hectares are affected by salinity. Salinity means salt has built up in the soil, often from seawater or irrigation with salty water, making it harder for roots to take up water. OlsAro is working with Bangladeshi seed company Lal Teer Seed towards a commercial launch there in 2027.
The company says the wheat produced up to 41% more grain than a moderately salt-tolerant variety under salty conditions in Bangladesh. That is OlsAro’s own figure, and its 2024 funding announcement put the gain at 52% against the same kind of comparison variety.
The wheat has been going through distinctness, uniformity and stability (DUS) testing, official trials that show a new variety differs from existing ones, grows evenly and stays the same from one generation to the next. OlsAro said in 2025 that it was in the second year of that testing in Bangladesh.
In India, business group DCM Shriram tested three OlsAro lines at two sites in Uttar Pradesh and one in Bihar during the 2024–25 winter growing season. Vice president Anand Shriram called the first-year results encouraging and said the company wanted another season of testing. “The yield and tolerance to area specific diseases are the prerequisites for adoption,” he said.
OlsAro said in 2025 that early trial results from Kenya and Pakistan showed its lines doing well against leading local varieties, and it now describes its wheat as being in advanced trials in both countries. The company also lists field trials for salt and heat tolerance in Australia, Egypt, Italy and Canada.
The Scale Of Salt-Hit Farmland
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations estimated in late 2024 that salt-affected soils cover about 1,381 million hectares, or 10.7% of the world’s land. Around 10% of both irrigated and rain-fed cropland is affected, although the agency said uncertainty in the data remains high.
FAO also warned that roughly one billion more hectares are at risk from climate change and poor land management. If warming continues on its current path, the agency projects, salt-affected areas could grow to 24–32% of total land. In the hardest-hit countries, salinity can cut yields of crops such as rice and beans by as much as 70%.
Where Europe’s Gene Rules Stand
The EU adopted its regulation on new genomic techniques (NGTs), the legal term for gene editing and related methods, in June 2026, but the rules will not apply until July 2028. Plants in the first category, known as NGT1, carry changes that could also arise naturally or through conventional breeding. Once verified, they will be treated like conventionally bred plants rather than as GMOs.
OlsAro points to its random-mutation route for its own seed. Faxö said in 2025 that this lets the company sell non-GMO seed globally. “This means we face no regulatory hurdles worldwide,” she said. That is the company’s own view, and its wheat still has to clear national variety tests such as the DUS trials in Bangladesh.
Money Flowing Into Crop Genetics
Tropic, a gene-editing company working on bananas and rice, closed a $105M Series C in March 2026, co-led by Forbion and Corteva Catalyst, the investment platform of US agriculture group Corteva. Tropic is developing bananas that resist diseases such as Tropical Race 4 (TR4), a soil-borne fungal disease.
Wild Bioscience, a University of Oxford spinout, raised $60M in a Series A led by the Ellison Institute of Technology in October 2025. It uses AI to find useful traits in wild plants and precision breeding to bring them into crops.
Belgian startup Rainbow Crops, which uses AI to guide editing of several genes at once, took a €9.7M seed round in June 2026. LIFTT EuroInvest, a vehicle set up by Italian venture firm LIFTT and the European Investment Bank, led the round, with Corteva Catalyst and PINC among the other backers.
OlsAro’s round is smaller than each of these, and its route differs: Tropic and Rainbow Crops build their products with gene editing, while OlsAro’s commercial lines come from random mutation. Sara Frykstrand Ångström, investment manager and head of intelligence at Industrifonden, said what convinced the fund was “the scientific work behind the company”, along with its field results and seed company partnerships.
