Rainbow Crops raises €9.7M seed to scale gene editing for crops

Agritech startup, Rainbow Crops, is developing improved craft varieties by engineering complex agronomic traits. The startup has just raised an oversubscribed €9.7 million seed round to accelerate the startup’s AI-supported multiplex genome editing capabilities, support deployment of its platform in key crops, and strengthen and grow the team across scientific and technical functions.

The funding round was led by LIFTT, with its vehicle LIFTT EuroInvest, and included participation from existing investors Agri Investment Fund, PINC, and VIB. Corteva, through its Corteva Catalyst investment platform, and Maia Ventures were new investors. Investors were drawn to Rainbow Crops’ potential to accelerate the development of climate-resilient and high-performing crop varieties, underpinned by early field research and proof-of-concept validation in corn.

“This investment allows us to accelerate the transition from early validation to systematic deployment of our platform,” said Giacomo Bastianelli, Co-Founder and CEO, Rainbow Crops. “Our goal is to accelerate complex trait engineering and make it accessible to partners globally.”

Traditional breeding has delivered strong outcomes in the past decades, yet engineering complex traits remains slow and costly. Ranbow Crops’ proprietary Trait Foundry platform integrates AI, multiplex genome editing, precision breeding, and automated phenotyping to systematically identify, generate, and evaluate combinations of genetic variants underlying complex agronomic traits such as yield or stress resilience. Combining multiplex genome editing with breeding means the platform creates populations of plants with rationally designed genetic diversity, enabling the efficient exploration and selection of multi-gene trait architectures at scale.

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